Talk about depressing findings. According to respondents to a survey conducted by New York research and consulting firm Strativity Group about the role and use of customer surveys within their organizations: the surveys don’t lead to useful new ideas (and instead are only meant to validate current practices); results don’t provide useful guidance and can’t be linked to actions; getting internal buy-in is very difficult; and, once the results are in, the validity of the surveys is called into question.

These and other rays of sunshine are reported in “Discovering the Real Answers: Customer Surveys - The New Realities.” Strativity fielded a Web-based questionnaire in the summer of 2006, garnering 217 responses from around the globe, with the majority coming from companies in North America . It included 10 questions, answerable with a 1-10 strongly disagree-strongly agree scale, plus one open-ended question.

Industries with the highest participation were consulting and professional services, technology, telecommunications and manufacturing. Company sizes ranged from fewer than 100 employees to more than 10,000.

Nearly 42 percent of respondents said that their customer surveys are not designed with strategic intentions. To these respondents, surveys are being used to preserve the status quo, not drive change. Just over half (52.3 percent) strongly agreed with the statement “Our surveys are designed to validate our current performance.”

Not surprisingly, only 50.2 percent agreed with the statement “Survey questions are designed to drive actions.”

Over three-quarters (77 percent) of the participants said they find it difficult to get buy-in for change within their organization. And 71 percent of the participants stated that there was very little internal follow-up to change behavior in the organization.

Lot of pain

There’s a lot of pain out there. Consider the plight of the poor souls who offered up the following responses to the open-ended question “I wish customer surveys would…”:

  • “Have more real-life/real business use and application in them, less trying to check out some cute theory that is not related to practical implementation.”
  • “Provide better insight into the things that our customers really value.”
  • “Be an accurate measure of customer satisfaction.”
  • “Be assessed at a deeper level by operations for improvement and change other than at the overall c-sat score level.”
  •  “Be impactful and acted upon.”
  • “Be more timely and specific to situations and individuals. I also wish they would be more specific to the customer experience: ask what the customers really want. Currently the questions are geared toward what we think they want.”
  • “Drive behavior change and action.”
  • “Be used by management to provide support in areas identified in surveys that could improve customer perceptions.”
  • “Provide the required feedback for corrective actions.”
  • “Really be taken serious. There is lots of truth within the answers, and customers are really willing to help and drive the change.”

Grouped by theme, the top five “I wish surveys would” sentiments expressed through the open-end were:

  • have more of an effect/provide more actionable results and suggestions (27 responses);
  • be more concise/specific and easy to complete (12);
  • more accurately measure customer satisfaction (10);
  • be offered more frequently and have a higher response rate (7);
  • better show progress over time and provide better feedback on actions taken (5).

Hiding

As Strativity’s report points out, “The results expose the fact that companies are hiding behind customer surveys as proof that they are listening to their customers, but in reality are not properly using the information once they have it.”

“Today’s companies are betraying their customers by asking them questions with little readiness to act upon their responses,” said Lior Arussy, CEO of Strativity Group, in a company press release. “Our study reveals the drastic disconnect between customer expectations and the actions of companies. This failure to turn customer insights into actionable solutions will ultimately be detrimental to a company’s bottom line.”

Still, there is hope. Strativity closes its report with some sage words. “If you don’t intend to follow up and change in a meaningful way, do not conduct a survey…Turning insight into action is a powerful method to establish an authentic and loyal relationship with customers. To achieve that, customer surveys need to evolve into a strategic dialogue with full commitment to execution…(By doing so) companies will effect both change and differentiation that customers will notice and respond to in an extremely profitable way.”