It was one of those fun coincidences that comes out of nowhere. I had just recently read an article about how companies were swamping consumers with too many surveys about too many trivial topics and as I boarded a crowded elevator at the recent QRCA conference, my liftmates (researchers all) happened to be one-upping each other with the inane questionnaire permutations they expected to get from the hotel chain after their stays. How was the oxygen in your room? Was the springiness of the buttons in the elevators to your liking? Could the hotel’s feng shui be improved?
The article, “Survey overload: Companies are inundating customers with endless surveys – and getting worse insights,” by Phil Wahba, has its own litany of “this would be funny if it weren’t so dispiriting” examples. (The piece was originally behind a paywall at Fortune magazine but I was somehow able to access it for free on Yahoo if you want to track it down.)
Reading it brought to mind all the conference sessions I've attended over the decades in which a speaker bemoans poor questionnaire design and our overreliance on screen after screen of mind-numbing radio-button grids, while audience members chuckle in total agreement about the awfulness, knowing full well they or someone else in their insights department either just sent out or was planning to send out that very kind of survey.
We are all aware that we are oversurveying and yet we can't or don't stop it. Declining response rates mean it takes more and more asks to get enough completes to cram into the gaping maws of all the tracking surveys companies are running. And each new wave of customer-centricity that washes over various industries results in a flood of management-driven “How are we doing!?” entreaties.
I know quantitative research is essential and more qual is not the panacea but this proliferation of surveys, coupled with the concern about survey fraud, makes me feel like we need to tip the scales back toward the in-person/face-to-face approach, where you can see the person whose opinions you are seeking and, at least in theory, get more nuance and color from word choice and body language than just a 7 on a 10-point scale.
Believe me, I know most researchers are caught in the middle here. They’re aware of the best practices, the dangers of oversurveying, the decreasing ROI on their efforts. But the Fortune article puts some useful numbers behind what most of us already feel in our bones. Qualtrics reports that the total number of customer and employee interactions processed on its platform has doubled since 2023, now topping 3.5 billion annually. U.S. firms were on track to spend $36.4 billion on market research last year. That is an awful lot of "How did we do?" emails generating an awful lot of noise – and, the experts quoted in the piece readily acknowledge, not a lot of signal.
Wharton's Peter Fader puts it bluntly: "If only all of this email besiegement was leading to meaningful insights. But it rarely does." Part of the problem is structural. Surveys overindex for the strongly opinionated – the delighted and the furious – while the vast middle, where most customers actually live, stays largely silent. You end up with a distorted picture that may feel like data but functions more like a funhouse mirror.
The article gestures toward AI as a potential corrective and perhaps it is. Smarter surveys that adapt in real time, that know when a customer has already been surveyed three times this month, that can route a complaint about a hotel’s broken fitness center to the property's maintenance queue – all of that sounds like progress.
But I'd argue the more fundamental fix isn't technological. It's philosophical. The industry needs to get honest about what surveys can and can't do, resist the institutional inertia that keeps bloated tracking programs alive long past their usefulness and – yes – invest more in the kinds of human conversation that produce genuine understanding rather than a river of 7s and 8s.