How Was Your Experience?

If you do anything, go anywhere or contemplate thinking about considering doing something, you will be bombarded with requests for your feedback. It started as a novel, valuable idea that might have even showed some care for us, the consumers. Quickly after the feeling of appreciation wore off, it became an utter nuisance and, in many cases, the only downside of the actual experience.

Because irony is one of the greatest things in life, at least we can bask in the fact that being asked about our experience is usually the worst part of that experience.

Thank you for dining with us on July 11, 2015. Please take two minutes and fill out a brief survey to let us know how we did.

How did we do on your flight from GRR to MSP on June 25, 2015? Please take two minutes to fill out a brief survey to let us know how we did.

How was your four-night stay in Lubbock, Texas? Please take two minutes to fill out a brief survey to let us know how we did.

Soon, we’ll be getting emails upon exiting the public restroom. How was your experience with urinal number five? This is meant as a joke, but the horrifying part is we’re not far from it being the truth.

The Original Intent

I have enough experience in marketing to hypothesize correctly these surveys began because customers are not honest in person. Every time you dine out, the waiter asks you how your food tastes. How often is it truly good? Maybe more often than not, but not every time. How often do you say it’s good? Quite possibly every time. Unless your pancakes are simply a wad of batter encased in a false crust, you’re likely to say everything is good just to get the waiter out of there. Many times, after telling the waiter the food is good, you will remark to your dining mates about how awful the food actually is.

Because most of us who dine out are filthy liars who refuse to give honest feedback, every restaurant thinks they are “good” and then wonder why they have to close their business down. Honest feedback, delivered politely, can be valuable to a business.

Travel services only hear from customers if there is a raging complaint to be made. Although I’m sure it happens, it’s extremely rare for someone to write a letter to Delta to compliment them on their on-time departure and smooth flight. However, if that plane leaves its origin airport two minutes late, there will be fury unleashed on the customer-service people by irrationally irate passengers. So, for the travel industry, these surveys were an attempt to get real feedback from all passengers as opposed to skewed feedback from the displeased.

Fine. Valuable. These companies used to even give people rewards for taking the surveys, like a $5 gift card to the restaurant or a few frequent-flier miles or hotel points. Now, they just bombard your inbox, impersonally thanking you for your business and telling you how important your feedback is to them.

Stop Asking Me About My Experience

Maybe I’m exacerbating this problem because I travel so often, and if so, I value your opinion and would appreciate you taking two minutes to leave a comment on this rant and give me your feedback, but I’m now at the point I don’t even remember the hotel that’s asking me how my stay was. Frequently, I’m receiving survey requests from two hotels ago, flight survey requests for individual segments, but because I fly so many similar segments, I don’t know if it’s the one that had the inattentive flight attendant or the one with the overly attentive flight attendant.

My overall experience with the entire service industry is good, except for these experience interrogations. Leave me alone. I have enough real email coming through to overwhelm me without having to remember whether there were enough towels at the hotel in Pensacola or if it was a painless experience to purchase a book online.

It’s important to note my apathy here, because earlier I mentioned how society refuses to give real feedback in real life, thereby requiring these surveys, which are now my vehicle for refusing to give real feedback. Is that why people stopped giving real feedback in person? Were there too many questions? Or was it a fear of hurting someone’s feelings? Whatever the case, marketing companies found away to get away from the false in-person feedback, but are now going to have to find a way to get around the false (or lack of) Internet feedback.

Does this inundation of feedback requests bother anyone else (with the full realization that question is in itself a feedback request, even if rhetorical)? If so, do what I’m doing to do. Next time someone seeks your feedback, copy the URL of this rant, then paste it into whatever space will allow you to do so on the questionnaire. This should be fun at least three times, at which point even that will become too overwhelming and I’ll just go back to deleting the emails.