Remember when a trip to the dentist ended when you got up from the chair? When dinner was over once you tossed the napkin on the table? When you only talked to the mechanic when your car broke down?
These days, almost everyone we do business with wants our name, address, email and cellphone number, meaning the simplest of transactions -- even at the self-checkout -- never truly ends.
The moment we think we've done all we need to do, there's an alert on the cellphone. Someone wants to know: How'd we do?
Did we enjoy our coffee at the café? How was the service at the retail store? What about the tech support we called yesterday?
These seemingly innocent surveys aren't just annoying; they're an imposition, often coming at inconvenient times -- during a busy workday or when we've just had a frustrating experience -- and they demand more of our precious time.
Do these businesses really want feedback, or are they just fishing for data to manipulate their services or, worse, to sell to third parties?
Don't kid yourself: Most of these surveys aren't meant to improve our experience as customers. The companies that send them aren't seeking genuine feedback but rather collecting data to shape their marketing strategies or refine algorithms.
Responses are often sorted and analyzed with little more than one goal in mind: maximizing profits. And what happens to our input? More often than not, it disappears into the abyss of automated systems, where it's never actually used to improve the service we're paying for.
Worse still, the relentless pursuit of feedback has started to feel transactional in itself. We're no longer engaging in a simple exchange where we pay for goods or services.
Instead, businesses now expect us to "pay" with our opinions, and they place undue pressure on us to provide five-star ratings or to justify every decision we make.
All this does is trivialize our voices, reducing us to just another data point in a company's customer satisfaction dashboard.
With time so precious these days, how about making 2025 the year of no customer surveys.
We know time is precious and we appreciate you reading this editorial.