Brands must stop pestering us for ‘feedback’ – it’s irritating, worthless and buys no loyalty
Data collection masquerading as customer feedback does nothing but irritate and antagonise and leads to a sub standard experience, argues Bob Hoffman
We can’t do anything these days without someone annoying the shit out of us for feedback.
Buy a cell phone? Pretty soon you’ll get an email inquiring about your buying experience. Visit the doctor? In a few days the ceo of the “system” will be asking you to rate your visit. Take a flight? You’ll get some free miles if you just complete the survey.
Every morning I go to a coffee shop called Peet’s. Every morning they ask me if I have their app. Every morning I say no. Every morning they tell me I should download the app because I can accumulate points and get a free cup of coffee. Every morning I tell them that if I wanted a free cup of coffee I would stay the fuck home and make it myself.
The whole business of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has evolved into not much more than a contest for who can collect the most data by constantly pestering the hell out of us.
It might be acceptable if these people were actually doing something useful with their data. But they’re not. The amount of time, energy, and money they are spending irritating us with data collection schemes disguised as feedback inquiries is way out of proportion to the actual application of this data to anything of value.
A recent article in Marketing Week was headlined “Customer Experience Investment Fails To Pay Off As Performance Hits All-Time Low”
The article says…
KPMG Nunwood’s annual Customer Experience Excellence study shows that rather than improving, the overall performance score for British brands has hit the lowest level in the eight-year history of the report
In other words, the more feedback they are getting from us, the worse they are performing. One of the executives at the company that did the research said…
“…part of the issue is that organisations are not structured to think effectively about the customer…”
I don’t know what that bullshit means, but here’s what I do know. Most companies are living in a fantasy world in which they think that if they engage (i.e: bother) us enough they can get us to “love” their brand.
Consumers, on the other hand, mostly don’t give a good flying shit about their brand. They want a cup of coffee and they want it now. And they don’t want to stand in line while the barista wastes everybody’s time trying to peddle a useless app to every bleary-eyed bastard who’s late for the bus.
If companies would stop wasting their time implementing their marketing department’s idiotic ideas about brand engagement and just provide better service, maybe customer satisfaction wouldn’t be at an all-time low.
This means they need to forget the juvenile delusion that we are all in love with brands. They need to stop trying to get us to love them by annoying the living shit out of us with emails, apps, social media contrivances, idiotic “content” and other engagement gimmicks that cost them a fortune and buy them not an ounce of loyalty.
Here’s the thing Ms Marketer – most of you are collecting data to “better understand” your customer. This is just code for sending us more useless, annoying crap. It is a colossal waste of your time, money and energy. And, as the research indicates, it has had the exact opposite of its intended effect.
The only value in data is if you actually do something useful with it. Annoying us with a relentless torrent of horseshit is the antithesis of useful.
Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and is the author of the Ad Contrarian blog
I see your point, but I think you are meddling a lot of issues into one here and it’s not really how marketers and research work.
Hold on, while I rant a little.
Data collection is an essential exercise for all marketing teams. True, some do it in a spammy way which could be improved, but it is certainly not an exercise that is ‘idiotic’. What your article is essentially saying is that marketers shouldn’t talk to the customer because it annoys them. That is poor advice and not an acceptable alternative to the spammy surveys. All the most successful brands collect and use data to create better products, marketing and customer service – because it works.
Even though you don’t suggest it, perhaps you are thinking that brands should explore another solution, such as using 3rd party research or tools from aggregated engagement data, which don’t interrupt the customer directly? But such data is notoriously unreliable and, to be honest, a pretty poor way to research your market – especially when the profitability of your business is at stake.
No, surveying the customer is not ‘idiotic’ and brands who do it are not “living in a fantasy world”. It is an essential and intelligent business practice because it is one of the best and most reliable ways to understand the customer, market and their product usage – three things every business needs to be knowledgeable about in order to be successful. I point to the successes of juggernauts like Amazon, Facebook and Google, which are essentially consumer research machines that sell some products.
Secondly, I don’t think any brand realistically thinks that “if they engage (i.e: bother) us enough they can get us to “love” them. It’s the wrong use of the word ‘engage’. One is research, the other is advocacy. They don’t correlate, even if the same team executes both actions. As a customer, I would never count a survey I completed an ‘engagement’ for the brand and as a marketer, I would never take a completed survey and call it ‘engagement’. I’d call it ‘research’ with a very different purpose and marketing objective behind it. You are talking about two very different issues here.
Thirdly, the line “stop wasting their time implementing their marketing department’s idiotic ideas about brand engagement and just provide better service” is confusing. It’s not a marketer’s job to provide customer service. It is a marketer’s job to research and understand their market, the customer and how best to promote products with that insight. The research they do (such as surveying the audience or collecting app data) is what actually influences and creates better customer service. I don’t know how you can expect a brand to just provide better customer service without having the brand take the time to research and understand their consumers. Good customer service is not just a matter of ‘doing it’. It must be grounded in insights generated from the consumer. If you want marketers to provide better customer service with less knowledge about the customer – the loser will be the consumer.
I understand this article to be a rant, and it was a good read. But the argument is weak and doesn’t really offer a strong solution to the problem you point out. The answer is not less research and more customer service. The answer is more research to develop better customer service.
Reply“Brands must stop pestering us for ‘feedback’ – it’s irritating, worthless and buys no loyalty”
What?!!! And put millions of useless people out of a job.
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