I’m tired of getting email requests to
rate products and services, and phone calls asking me to answer a survey.
I looked online and found a name for this:
"feedback fatigue". Seriously, I get emails from doctors and medical
facilities, hotels and travel services, HVAC companies and companies that have
installed windows for me, companies I have bought stuff from on-line and
sometimes in-store, the school system, and sometimes even from the town I live
in. If I go to a conference, there’s a form to fill out at the end, and if I
sign up for a class with some organization, they want an end-of-class rating.
Finally (I hope) strangers occasionally call to ask my opinion on politics,
products, or services. I’m getting good at saying, “No, I don’t want to take a
survey” before they get too far along in their spiel.
In fact, I've basically given up
filling out any feedback requests or
surveys at all. I don't respond when a company I've bought from eagerly
requests a rating, though I realize I use such ratings myself to figure out if
they are reliable. I don't fill out surveys from my doctor's practice or the
hospital, after filling out a few too many and trying to remember details like
how long I waited (which appointment was it, again?) before actually seeing the
doctor. I tend not to respond to surveys from services I've used, either, unless
I actually want to rate them. That is, sometimes the service person was so nice
I want to say something nice in return, or I thought they were particularly
efficient, or else I have a (mild) complaint I'd like to register.
I really
hate situations where the person indicates that getting a good rating would
help them with their job--that has occasionally happened and I hate
feeling pressured. And of course, if I’m supposed to fill out a form in front
of them (which happened at least once) the feedback becomes insincere and totally
useless. I also hate having to rate a perfectly adequate but unexceptional
experience on a five-point scale.
The problem with the five-point scale (or
the ten-point scale) is that somehow an adequate experience such as "it
arrived on time and was what I ordered--no complaints" is supposed to get
a 5, which means that it gets the same rating as "your sales people were
so helpful in finding what I needed and shipping it to me even though I didn’t
know what it was called--thank you!". Back in the brief period when I
taught, I told my students that I regarded an A as signifying above and beyond
the usual, not merely "you didn't do anything wrong." Otherwise, how
could I single out the really top-notch students with a high grade?
As long as I’m on the subject of grade
inflation, by the way, what is it with the applause inflation? I go to a
performance of some kind and almost without fail people rise up and stand
during the applause. When did a standing ovation go from being a response to a truly
amazing performance to being the usual response to a merely good performance? I want
to save something for those
performances that blow me away, but I feel like a curmudgeon if I remain seated
when everyone else is standing.
Anyway, the problem with the feedback
requests isn’t just dealing with the five-point scale, or even the sheer number
of requests. Often the questions themselves are hard to answer. Sometimes they
don't seem important. I can understand a doctor's office being concerned about
cleanliness, but I've seen questions about cleanliness for situations where it
didn’t seem that relevant. I don't want to have to decide if a store was a 4 or
a 5 for cleanliness. Just leave me a comment space. If the store rated a 2 in
cleanliness, you can be sure I’ll say something.
One of the things I liked about the
book The Circle by Dave Eggers was the way it highlighted the problem of
feedback requests by twisting and exaggerating them. In the book, the main
character's job required her to request feedback for every transaction and anything below
nearly perfect had to be followed up to make everything right, which then
necessitated a request for feedback on the follow-up experience ... It was
crazy. And then there was the guy who took the whole idea much too far by
asking for numerical feedback on his performance in his personal life (yes, that
performance). Talk about putting someone on the spot. The last thing we need in
our personal relationships is numerical ratings.
Getting back to the non-fictional world--I
realize that appropriate feedback can help one improve. But how to avoid creating
feedback fatigue? For starters, I would like the option to "just click
here if things were okay and you have nothing else to say". I might be
willing to give one click to help a
deserving business accumulate an adequate rating. There could be an option to
fill out a longer form for those who actually have something to say--good or
bad—and who want to leave comments.
Even so, the forms need to be better
thought out (see the bit about cleanliness questions.) Sometimes in surveys the
school sends out, I don't understand what they are asking about (avoid
acronyms!) or else the wording of the question makes any answer misleading. This
is especially true of questions that ask about multiple people or events. If
two teachers are great, two are okay, and one is dreadful, how do I answer a
question asking me to rate my child's teachers overall on a five point scale? (I
think that was a real question.)
Will feedback requests and surveys get
better (and shorter) as people respond with increasing irritation? Are we
doomed to years of being buried under such requests, just as we are constantly
fighting spam and junk telephone calls without an end in sight? Is it part of
the human condition?
Am I so fatigued by feedback requests
that I'm getting downright silly?
Yes.
Till next post.
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