Companies have our data. Why do they keep asking if we like them?

Companies have more ways than ever to collect data about us — their customers. Firms can follow the location of our smartphones, track our behavior online or simply purchase customer information from data brokers.

And yet, firms still want to know what we think of them. For that, they approach it the old-fashioned way: by asking us. Over. And over. And over.

In the last month alone, I’ve received calls from my doctor’s office asking how my visit went, texts from my phone provider asking about my recent chat with customer service and dozens of emails asking me about seemingly everything I buy.

“It’s completely annoying. It’s inappropriate. It’s just silly,” said Fred Reichheld, a fellow at Bain. 

Reichheld may not have much license to complain because he invented what many consider the gold standard of customer feedback questions: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company (or product/service) to a friend or colleague?”

In the early 2000s, Reichheld designed a one-question survey to help companies figure out whether customers would become repeat customers.

“We tested a number of candidates, including: ‘How satisfied were you?’ And ‘What’s your intent to repurchase?’” he said. But the likely-to-recommend question was the one that actually generated useful data.

“I didn’t really understand the power of that. We were just doing correlations to real customer subsequent purchases, and that was the one that best predicted them in most industries,” said Reichheld. 

Go ahead, search your email inbox for some variation of “How likely are you to recommend to a friend?” You’ve seen this question. A lot. And many others like it, in part because it’s so easy for companies to ask.

“All of this is automated,” said Sarah Moore, a marketing professor at the University of Alberta. Companies used to have to send you snail mail or call you on the phone, if they could even find your contact info. But these days, Moore said, companies “can spam you with surveys and text messages immediately after you purchase. It comes with the receipt that’s in your email because you used your credit card.”

More than 90% of these requests are ignored. While the constant prodding for feedback may bother some customers, it doesn’t tend to hurt firms’ bottom lines, said Dina Mayzlin, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California. “I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of [customer] alienation, given how easy it is to erase an email or ignore a prompt.”

Those who do respond to the surveys can provide important signals to companies, including early warning signs of product issues. Moore gave the example of a big-box retailer that was selling a faulty Wi-Fi device. The company saw a jump in negative survey data, said Moore. “So, they were able to identify all the customers who had bought those before all those customers complained.” 

The store fixed the issue and avoided a public relations disaster, she said. 

For all the high-tech ways companies collect data about us, surveys still have a unique ability to reveal what’s happening inside customers’ heads. “When you do a survey, you can quickly understand how customers feel about their experiences,” said Maxie Schmidt, a principal analyst at Forrester.

Firms can use survey results to coach employees or improve product offerings. 

But Schmidt said companies need to tread lightly with surveys — sometimes they’re too long, or they feel like an interrogation. Those surveys, “instead of being a tool that customers feel heard, they end up being a tool that customers feel not validated, not valued and ignored.”

Schmidt said there are just too many feedback requests coming at customers these days. She thinks about surveys the same way she thinks about drinking wine. “If you drink one glass of wine, it’s good. If you drink two glasses of wine, it’s better. But starting at three glasses of wine, it gets worse again,” she said. “That’s the peak wine effectiveness. And in this industry, we’ve really moved past peak survey effectiveness.”

Even Reichheld, who invented the would-you-recommend-to-a-friend survey question, thinks there are better ways to learn how customers feel without pissing them off. Firms can analyze phone transcripts from customer service calls or track customers online.

“You can use digital signals and eventually [artificial intelligence] to get a deeper understanding and stop pounding your poor customers with survey requests,” Reichheld said. 

For now, though, as of the last check of my inbox, the requests are still rolling in.