If I were still embedded full-time inside corporate marketing organizations, this is the practice I would aggressively challenge first: how customer surveys are designed, deployed, and justified today.
No area of marketing is more poorly executed or more blindly defended than customer surveys.
What began as a legitimate effort to listen to customers has turned into a high-volume, low-value data extraction exercise that often annoys customers and overwhelms internal teams. The result is a growing pile of insights that no one acts on, paired with customers who feel exhausted, pressured, and ultimately unheard.
Survey Fatigue Is Real, and It Has Consequences
A recent Forbes article cites that almost one in five (19%) customers stopped doing business with a company because a survey was too long, showing a clear link between poorly designed surveys and lost customers (Hyken, 2024). That statistic alone should stop every marketing leader in their tracks.
When customers disengage not because of price, quality, or service, but because of how often they’re asked to give feedback, we’ve crossed the line from listening into liability.
And yet, surveys keep coming. After purchases. During checkouts. Inside apps. Via email. Via SMS. Often stacked on top of review requests.
This is not customer-centric marketing. It’s self-aggrandizement marketing.
The Back-Office Reality: Data Without Action
Even when survey data is collected responsibly, most organizations lack the operational intention or mechanism to do anything meaningful with it.
What many marketing survey operations resemble today is the classic Lucy in the candy factory problem: data keeps coming in faster and faster, teams scramble to keep up, and eventually everything falls on the floor.
At that point, surveys stop being “listening tools” and become organizational self-soothing mechanisms, creating the illusion of customer focus without the discipline to follow through.
The Real Problem No One Wants to Say Out Loud
Let’s be honest:
For some teams, surveys have become a lazy substitute for real customer understanding. Customer service is often deployed to a phone bank in another continent or to bots. When was the last time you talked with a real person who was empowered to help you?
Today’s practices allow marketers to feel productive without doing the harder work:
· Observational research
· Journey mapping
· Behavioral analysis
· Front-line immersion
· Longitudinal customer panels
· Closed-loop feedback systems
In many organizations, surveys are increasingly deployed early in the sales cycle, sometimes appearing before a customer can even complete a purchase. When feedback requests block conversion paths, the organization is no longer serving the customer; it’s serving itself.
The practice of combining surveys with review requests further escalates the issue. Customers experience this as coercive and transactional, not relational. It reads less like “We value your voice” and more like “please validate us.”
And with healthcare organizations, the problem is at the other end of the spectrum – surveys are deployed too late. Patient experience data is most often gathered through standardized, post-visit surveys such as those administered by Press Ganey© rather than through real-time, in-the-moment listening. These surveys are frequently distributed days or weeks after care has been delivered and can be lengthy, covering multiple dimensions of the patient journey. Research shows that response rates for Press Ganey-style patient satisfaction surveys often fall between 16–19%, raising serious concerns about survey fatigue, nonresponse bias, and the representativeness of the data collected (Live MDedge, n.d.). When organizations rely heavily on delayed, low-response surveys instead of direct, contextual feedback at the point of care, they risk collecting volumes of data that feel statistically rigorous but are disconnected from lived patient experience and difficult to act on in any meaningful way.
Common Survey Practices That Need to Go
If organizations want surveys to be assets rather than brand liabilities, the following practices must be retired:
1. Too frequent
Repeated requests erode goodwill and drive disengagement.
2. Too long
Customers do not owe you a 15-minute questionnaire.
3. Directly tied to purchase moments
Do not interrupt revenue-generating behavior with feedback demands.
4. Obstructive digital placement
Pop-ups that block navigation or checkout damage UX and trust.
5. No disclosure of process
Customers are rarely told how their feedback will be used or if it will be used at all.
6. No disclosure of results
When customers never see outcomes, surveys feel pointless.
7. No follow-up or accountability
Collecting insights without action is worse than not collecting them at all.
A Better Way Forward
Customer surveys are not inherently bad. Irresponsible survey strategy is.
Organizations that get this right:
· Survey less, but with greater intent
· Align feedback collection to specific decisions. Don’t ask if you won’t act.
· Resource teams to act on insights
· Close the loop visibly with customers
· Treat feedback as a relationship, not a metric
Listening to customers is not about volume. It’s about respect and follow-through.
Until marketing leaders are willing to re-engineer their customer feedback practices and tie findings to operational improvements, surveys will continue to do what they’re doing now: annoy customers, overwhelm teams, and damage your brand.
Hyken, S. (2024, August 25). One in five customers stop doing business with you because of your survey. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2024/08/25/one-in-five-customers-stop-doing-business-with-you-because-of-your-survey
Live MDedge. (n.d.). Gender and racial biases in Press Ganey patient satisfaction surveys. https://live.mdedge.com/content/gender-and-racial-biases-press-ganey-patient-satisfaction-surveys