The Customer Aggravation Index: Predicting Customer Loyalty Without Surveys

I don't know about you, but I hate customer satisfaction surveys. We are all inundated with them thanks to email. It used to be these things came in the mail (easy to throw out) or by telephone (hang up). Now, most of them come via email. I stay in hotels 100-plus nights a year, and no matter how big or small the hotel was, they always manage to send me a survey several days later. Like you, I delete the survey unless I really had a bad experience.

I did waste 15 minutes filling out one I got from a St. Regis Hotel vendor and was madder after filling out the survey than before I started it because there was no place for me to explain the problems I experienced at the property. Plus, I had to waste 15 minutes of my time, telling a company I just paid a lot of money to how they screwed up.

Companies know that people are busy and hate filling out lengthy surveys, so two of the latest techniques are to make some vague offer that you might win something if you fill out the survey ("Earn a chance t win 100,000 airline miles") or to make the survey really short. A big trend now is one question surveys, called net promoter score. The biggest problem with these brief surveys is still most people don't fill them out unless they are mad, and if you only ask one question and get a low rating, you don't know what made them mad or what to do about it.