Dear reader, you’re clearly a savvy internet user if you’re able to navigate the web well enough to be reading this column. So you’ve probably noticed how you can’t go to a single website today without being prompted to take a survey about your experience or answer questions about the type of content you’d like to see.
It’s become common knowledge that anyone you give your email to will send you solicitations asking for help improving their services or begging you for feedback. I’m a regular user of several business management software platforms, and they’ve all drastically increased the presence of pop-ups to recommend additional services and take my temperature on the tools that I already use.
Everybody is trying to help me by improving my experience. And it’s exhausting. At this point, I spend more time in a day turning off the help balloon in the solicitous platform than I do accomplishing tasks. If I have to access five platforms all day, I can be confident that all five will have “new” information to give me and more than likely several questions to ask.
I get it — a lot of people are trying to improve user experience. Swathes of the job market are dedicated to drip campaigns and collecting feedback from users. And it’s nice to think that we can all give just a little bit of information to improve the tools and services we use every day.
But it’s not just a little attention. It may be a few simple questions for one provider, sure, but when you’re receiving these prompts from ten, twenty, thirty businesses a day, suddenly the time investment isn’t as insignificant as these companies seem to suppose. When everyone wants just a little, I’m disincentivized to give anyone anything at all.
Today’s lesson is one in customer experience and marketing. If you are in a decision-making position over how often your organization solicits customers for feedback, be judicious. There is a lot of noise out there, and adding to the din for a frivolous reason isn’t going to earn you any goodwill from your user base.
If you simply must prompt users about an exciting new (or new to them) feature, stick to one singular, simple recommendation. One retailer that I particularly like, whose name rhymes with Mommy Llama, reaches out to me three times one day to alert me to new offerings and query me for comments on an item that I purchased a decade ago.
I know that we all crave data. Feedback and information can go a long way in helping improve your offerings. But it helps to move with a light touch. Here’s a case study for my argument: a business I’ve been working with wanted a cross section understanding of marketing spend. They solicited input from a bunch of divisions, allowing respondents to group their answers into one of a handful of categories.
While this got them a lot of data, they decided that it would be more useful to have more granular information. Six buckets grew to thirty-two. With six they had a crude understanding of where the marketing budget went. With thirty-two, they had absolutely no idea. Perhaps predictably, people didn’t want to spend time dividing down this information into the smallest possible subsections, so they lumped it all into one bucket to make the task go away.
By trying to get more, they gave themselves substantially less. This doesn’t mean you should throw up your hands and lament how you can never collect data, but it’s a sign to be cautious that you aren’t generating the mindless noise that constantly drones throughout the internet.
You already have a relationship with your customers and clients. Don’t abuse it. Nurture that connection, give more than you get, and be very careful with the mindset that you’re helping your customers when you solicit their opinions.