Top Retailers Waste Time with Flawed Surveys

In what thy are calling a first of its kind study, Interaction Metrics examines the customer satisfaction surveys of 51 top US retailers. The study finds that retailers like Amazon and Walmart waste customers' time—and their own—with critically flawed surveys.

Retailers issue millions of customer satisfaction surveys each day, raising the question of whether these surveys are worth the paper they're written on.

The top two problems: retailers collect inaccurate data, and they fail to show active customer listening. Based on an objective evaluation of 15 elements, the surveys scored 43 out of 100 points, an F grade.

Other findings include:

With 23 questions on average, the surveys were excessively long.

32% of all questions lead customers to give answers that companies want to hear.

7-Eleven had the best survey—it was 13 questions, none of which were leading or used biased wording.

Family Dollar had the worst customer survey—it had 69 questions, 29 of which were leading.

Nordstrom, the retailer most known for customer service, stated its survey would take 2 minutes—but with 25 questions, it took 4-5 minutes.

Martha Brooke, Chief Analyst and Founder of Interaction Metrics, concludes: "To get real value from their customer satisfaction surveys, retailers need to strengthen their survey science—and take a creative approach to showing customers they care."

This study highlights how easy it is to produce a flawed survey. The findings should be considered by any company with a customer listening program.

The retailers selected for the 2016 Customer Listening Study were the National Retail Federation's (NRF) top retailers, omitting supermarkets and membership stores. Surveys were collected between June 23 and July 27, 2016. While Interaction Metrics is in the business of providing scientific customer surveys, making them uniquely qualified to evaluate the top retailers' surveys, this is an independent study—neither Interaction Metrics nor its employees have ties (financial or otherwise) to the retailers in this study.