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Last week I made the disturbing discovery that Google Maps believes the building of a London apartment where I have lived for the past 19 years is at an address I have never heard of.
If you put this other address in Google Maps, we’ll pop up a picture of our building. This may explain why our emails tend to get lost.
However, when I went online to tell Google about the issue, I discovered something bad. A question appeared on the screen before I had the opportunity to start typing my complaints.
It’s fair to say he was unhappy given that he hadn’t had the opportunity to experience his help experience at that point.
This was a low point, but it started to feel like an explosion of customer feedback requests.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Royal Mail every time I deliver a package.
Now that I know the situation with Google Maps, I have a new respect for the efforts. But I never fill out any of that investigation. Also, no matter which company creates a company that delivered, the other person who always arrives on the same day will never fill out.
Similarly, when WhatsApp clumsyly downloads it via the Microsoft Store and then sends a message asking you to rate it, I don’t.
The same applies to physical therapists, telephone companies, bookstores and airlines.
Experts say I don’t imagine that the company’s plea for feedback has become a mushroom. “There are now more tools available, and digital research is on the rise,” said a marketing consultant at Roisin Kirby, a related lecturer in marketing at Nottingham Business School in the UK.
It’s also not surprising to hear that even bosses in the feedback industry think things are out of control.
“The feedback experience is just scary,” says David Solana, co-founder of a customer experience management platform called Openator.
He says the impersonal, timeless, undesigned survey floods rarely exceed 20%, and sometimes means meeting potential clients with customer response rates below 2%.
In addition to research fatigue, the answers companies receive are because once people are enthusiastic about giving feedback, things are when things are wrong.
Furthermore, discrepancies are not all companies capable of analyzing data collected in such a way as to provide useful information.
Solana’s platform claims that by simply explaining feedback research and making it more like playing the game than filling out a survey, things can be improved. The research is also designed to do most things. These benefits can be small. Automotive companies may provide a Spotify playlist of road trip songs, for example, if you share your thoughts.
Such a move may not shake up anti-feedback extremists like me, but they remind me that there are very few exceptions that I make to my non-response rules when there is something for me.
Rate Uber drivers when asked.
When my IT help desk colleagues at work help me organize my dangerous laptop, I tend to respond when they ask me to rate their performance.
This is because they argue that the research is concise and that whether feedback is good or bad will help improve services that are highly likely to use in the future. In other words, responding is my interest.
I don’t hate businesses that try to understand what their customers want. This is almost nothing new or controversial.
The difference is that many of today’s inhumane digital efforts are clearly misguided.
The owner handed her a cappuccino and said, “What do you think about coffee? Would you recommend our store? Do you think your feedback is important?”
No one does this in real life. It’s also pointless to do that online.
