" …'Ere, he says he’s not dead. Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill. … I’m getting better! No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment. …I think I’ll go for a walk You’re not fooling anyone, you know"
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Surveys are the worst possible solution to the data collection problem, until you consider the alternatives, the joke goes. The punchline is that there are no alternatives. It’s fast becoming time to reconsider.
Fact is, surveys are on a steady, but inevitable, fall from grace. I will illustrate my case through example. Google "Nielson Box" and choose images. Take a look at the pictures, it’s like looking at stills from one of those fashionable TV series set in the 50’s (which presumably Nielsen measures) when a computer could conveniently fit into a small living room (if you had the air conditioning, which you didn’t). It’s not the future, but it was the only available tech at the time. Advertisers showed you commercials, you watched (yes son, we watched TV commercials back then!) and advertisers had to figure out if they got value for money (good luck with that). Then came click through ads and you didn’t have to guess as much. Next, coupons attached to your facebook page that will not only enable the promoter to track your exact purchase, and that of your friends, but also probably whoever you stood in the line next to at Starbucks this morning. OK, I made that bit about Starbucks up, it’s not shipping yet.
My point is this: the means to understand the effectiveness of promotions is shifting from the universe of analog, imprecise, measured by guesswork technology, into a world of “big data”: precision, measurability, real time. It’s not a surprise, it’s telegraphed.
Surveying is reaching a zenith. Gone are the antique days of the clipboard, today we have … the digital clipboard! Low cost equals ubiquity. Fancy a beer tonight? Let’s survey the gang. We are getting saturated.
In the short term, there will be a flight to quality. No, you can’t survey me and ask me if I did travel on the flight after all, or did I buy your product, you need to figure that out in advance. I won’t spend 30 minutes filling in your crazy complex questionnaire, especially if I suspect you won’t do anything with it anyway. Come to think of it, you didn’t do anything with it last time I sent it in. Please don’t make it look visually cheap: it’s a form of your market communication after all, what does it say about your firm? Oh, the ad at the bottom of the page is a nice touch, very professional. BTW, your colleagues in another department just surveyed me the other day to ask about the best color palette for the new microsite design, so I’m tapped out for the year.
The bar is getting raised, and the companies that can’t leap it will find that nobody shows up for the party, or worse, only the folk who want free beer. But that’s all today. In the long run we can see that surveys will be less important. Because your customers have already told you what they think.
On the phone with your contact center. In email to your sales team. And above all, in the social web, to their actual friends, Facebook friends, LinkedIn friends-I-want-a-job-from, etc. Worse for you, unlike many survey responses, someone might actually be watching these comments.
Now, our technology relies on survey data to work. And we are not seeing any sudden let up in demand for surveys. But, just because your uncle Frankie told you that Blockbuster stock was a buy in 1990 didn’t mean he was wrong at the time, just that you should keep an eye on the future while getting what you need to get done today. We will need surveys for the foreseeable future, but we need to start building our expertise around a future of social media, massive unstructured and unprompted data streams and, above all, customers who talk to each other at a time and place of their choosing, not ours.
See you at the Net Promoter Conference in London in June, for Net Promoter 2.0
