The other evening, I got a call asking me to participate in a survey. As I am a marketer and a communicator, I know the value survey feedback can provide and I am usually an easy mark when it comes to surveys. I agreed after being told that the survey would only take "a few minutes." 15 minutes into the survey, with no signs of things slowing down, I was reminded of how a recent AP article reported that people are getting tired of being asked for feedback. The article indicated that people in general are feeling fatigue when it comes to surveys.
Undoubtedly it is a good thing to ask your customers and other stakeholders for their input. Without question, a company should consider customer feedback when evaluating new or changing product features. And it is so easy these days! Google the phrase "free survey tools" and you will get pages of options that let you send out quick little electronic surveys that look good and automatically tabulate the results for you. You can generate charts and graphs of the results in seconds. It is a beautiful thing!
Nevertheless, cheap and easy survey capabilities may actually be doing marketers a disservice. When it costs thousands of dollars to even think about doing a survey, those hosting a survey have to carefully consider the questions they are asking and the value of the answers that they will get back. Questions that yield answers that are not actionable are (usually) eliminated. Redundant questions are culled. Heck, some companies even pre-test their surveys! Companies who pay to have their surveys done professionally have a financial incentive to make sure their surveys were tight and targeted and purposeful.
With the preponderance of cheap and easy to implement survey tools (Survey Monkey I'm talking about you!) it has been too easy to just dash off a quick survey without giving a lot of thought as to what the question is really asking, or what the results of the question will provide as far as usable and actionable data. This means not only do we get approached to take more surveys on the computer or the phone, but the surveys themselves are more and more frequently confusing, inane, highly biased or just plain no fun to take!
So, if you are a marketer who is surveying your audience, my advice is to act as if you are paying thousands of dollars to have each question asked. If you aren't going to get at least thousands of dollars of value from the answers, don't ask the question.
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