Surveys

In my industry JD Power is the Godfather of all things surveys. Our business is driven by manufacturer's surveys and online reviews such as FB and Google. Do you take the time to fill out surveys? If so how do you fill them out?

I recently had a doc appt and received a survey about my visit in my email. I blindly went through the survey and gave my doc all top box scoring. Top box scoring uses words like excellent, extraordinary, beyond my expectations etc etc. I did that because I like my doc and didn't want her to get the best "score" I could give her. Now, do I truly feel my visit was "extraordinary" be definition? Nah, I mean what kind of doc visit is extraordinary, it was just a normal doc visit. By definition it was a very good visit but if I gave her that mark it would've been a failing survey.

How much weight do you give to surveys and online reviews.

one must take all surveys with a grain of salt..
we have surveys in food service too.. only about 10% of the student population will fill out the survey and they are usually bad..so I take it as 90% of the students are happy..

So true. You always hear the bad.

When on vacation I'll look at google reviews for restaurants, but like you say, I always take them with a grain of salt. I like to make my own judgement as to whether or not it's a good place to eat.

when it comes to restaurants i like to see  what are the issues..usually people complain about the service or the tablecloths had a stain..stuff like that i ignore..but if they complain about dirty bathrooms etc then i take notice..

bathrooms are easy to keep clean, if they are dirty , i can only imagine the kitchen..
my go to car reviewer is Scotty Killmer..That dude seems to shoot straight..

I agree that online reviews like Yelp you have to read the actual reviews rather then just the score. A lot of the time you find that people go in with unrealistic expectations or nit pick little unimportant (to me at least) details.

Regarding the post-transaction online surveys, they are completely useless. I think I remember being offered a $20 gift card for an all-positive review when I bought my Honda Pilot.

My industry is in love with focus grouping new products which is just as bad I think. I could fill a book with the products I’ve gotten into stores that didn’t make it past the launch phase. The stinkers are pretty easy to spot at this point. We call them Introductory Closeouts. Seeing management and suppliers come through with one new product after another the we know will not make leaves you pretty jaded. Might be time for me to look for a new business.

Brownski wrote

  We call them Introductory Closeouts.  

That's a good one

You bring up a good point Broski and that is rewarding someone to take a survey. That's a big no-no in the industry yet it's still somehow common. There's also a metric called Survey Quality Index, or coaching. What's better? Would you rather have a high satisfaction score knowing it's due to coaching or a lower satisfaction score with a higher score in pure data that you can use to better your business.

One could argue both sides of this issue.

Ultimately good data is useful and bad data is not. The problem, I’m sure, is that somebody along the way is using individual surveys to beat up on salesmen or business managers so the incentive is to phony it up to avoid pain in the short term. But the data is tainted and useless long term.

Not just in my industry, but in general it seems like surveys set the person/biz up to fail. Most survey results are graded pass fail. Meaning that anything below a top box score is considered fail by JD Power. That said, how does one not coach to ensure proper data. If an individual is not aware that a score of very good is failing then how can they accurately fill out a survey.  

I do reviews if I am extremely happy or extremely displeased.

Reading them is important  People sometimes rave, nothing negative and then give a 3.

Harvey wrote

  People sometimes rave, nothing negative and then give a 3.

Part of what I do is monitor our satisfaction index. From where I sit this is very common. Customer comments will be glowing but the actual score of a survey may be bad.