Brands must stop pestering us for ‘feedback’ – it’s irritating, worthless and buys no loyalty
Data collection masquerading as customer feedback does nothing but irritate and antagonise and leads to a sub-standard experience, argues Bob Hoffman.
We can’t do anything these days without someone annoying the shit out of us for feedback.
Buy a cell phone? Pretty soon you’ll get an email inquiring about your buying experience. Visit the doctor? In a few days the ceo of the “system” will be asking you to rate your visit. Take a flight? You’ll get some free miles if you just complete the survey.
Every morning I go to a coffee shop called Peet’s. Every morning they ask me if I have their app. Every morning I say no. Every morning they tell me I should download the app because I can accumulate points and get a free cup of coffee. Every morning I tell them that if I wanted a free cup of coffee I would stay the fuck home and make it myself.
The whole business of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has evolved into not much more than a contest for who can collect the most data by constantly pestering the hell out of us.
It might be acceptable if these people were actually doing something useful with their data. But they’re not. The amount of time, energy, and money they are spending irritating us with data collection schemes disguised as feedback inquiries is way out of proportion to the actual application of this data to anything of value.
A recent article in Marketing Week was headlined “Customer Experience Investment Fails To Pay Off As Performance Hits All-Time Low”
The article says…
KPMG Nunwood’s annual Customer Experience Excellence study shows that rather than improving, the overall performance score for British brands has hit the lowest level in the eight-year history of the report
In other words, the more feedback they are getting from us, the worse they are performing. One of the executives at the company that did the research said…
“…part of the issue is that organisations are not structured to think effectively about the customer…”
I don’t know what that bullshit means, but here’s what I do know. Most companies are living in a fantasy world in which they think that if they engage (i.e: bother) us enough they can get us to “love” their brand.
Consumers, on the other hand, mostly don’t give a good flying shit about their brand. They want a cup of coffee and they want it now. And they don’t want to stand in line while the barista wastes everybody’s time trying to peddle a useless app to every bleary-eyed bastard who’s late for the bus.
If companies would stop wasting their time implementing their marketing department’s idiotic ideas about brand engagement and just provide better service, maybe customer satisfaction wouldn’t be at an all-time low.
This means they need to forget the juvenile delusion that we are all in love with brands. They need to stop trying to get us to love them by annoying the living shit out of us with emails, apps, social media contrivances, idiotic “content” and other engagement gimmicks that cost them a fortune and buy them not an ounce of loyalty.
Here’s the thing Ms Marketer – most of you are collecting data to “better understand” your customer. This is just code for sending us more useless, annoying crap. It is a colossal waste of your time, money and energy. And, as the research indicates, it has had the exact opposite of its intended effect.
The only value in data is if you actually do something useful with it. Annoying us with a relentless torrent of horseshit is the antithesis of useful.
Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and is the author of the Ad Contrarian blog
“If companies would stop wasting their time implementing their marketing department’s idiotic ideas about brand engagement and just provide better service, maybe customer satisfaction wouldn’t be at an all-time low.”
Spot on, Bob.
Less ‘brand engagement’. Better products and service. How hard can it be?
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Excellent piece. Succinct and to the point.
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What a deluded baby boomer!
Ask one of your grand kids to teach you how to un-tick the subscribe box and that may alleviate some of the aggro toward data collection.
The article shows a total lack of understanding of the modern enterprise, by citing “improved customer service” as the masthead of customer satisfaction. Consumers these days prioritise speed, quality, convenience and even price above customer service. Customer service is merely a fail safe for when something goes wrong (unless you’re a baby boomer who is charmed by the retail assistant) in which case the experience has already soured. So the customer interaction is about recovery.
Underpinning the entire argument from the coffee app outlier is clutching at straws. For every piece of data we volunteer, we forfeit a piece of our privacy and are rewarded with a more integrated, seamless consumer experience. Companies small and large are working to better profile and influence consumer buying habits. This isn’t as lineal as reading your sternly worded feedback comments, it’s about building a dataset on your cohort and understanding the beginning and end of the buying cycle, the interactions, the influencing factors, the way in which you digest information etc.
You may disagree with the erosion of privacy and the use of data for commercial gain, but to state that enterprises aren’t using this data and unlocking the true value of it is totally farcical and factually incorrect!
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Sorry Lanky. But I would back Bob Hoffman’s body of work over your opinion.
My favourite is my health fund that EVERY time I make a HICAPS claim I am SMSd for their NPS score. They then SMS “And why did you give that score?”.
I simply love replying “Because you bloody well asked me to!”.
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I’m not saying every organisation has a perfect comms strategy, but there are ways to opt in and out receiving these comms. What I contend is the data is actually being put to very good use. We are at the dawn of the AI and data age. The archaic mindset from the likes of Bob cannot see the forest from the trees. It’s not about annoying vanity metrics like NPS, it’s about an unprecedented understanding that will change the way we consume.
It’s easy to agree with an angry old baby boomer. It’s slightly more challenging to take on board his viewpoint and see the issue is slightly more complex.
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Brilliant piece. I am sick of being expected to fill out marketing surveys every time my car is serviced, knowing that if the response is less than perfect some poor sap is going to get his arse kicked and I’m going to get a bunch of calls from everyone from head office to the local dealership offering apologies and begging for forgiveness.
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But who is building the data set?
Who owns the app? Is it a white label app that the coffee shop is using, or one forced down on them from national office, or one that’s doing a deal with all the local shops, or something else? Are they a local company, a national one or one with international owners?
(Okay, I looked up Peet’s and they are a US coffee chain with the Peetnik Reward Program that also rewards you for checking in at different Peet locations.)
Your fully integrated “buying cycle” concept works only if the app is also tracking every other (related) purchase and behaviour being made. If the app is only being used to build a top level customer list of people who buy coffee at that shop in an updated version of the loyalty card system, then none of your proposed benefits are going to be delivered.
It certainly won’t deliver an improved and seamless customer service experience without substantive back-end investment from the coffee shop to use the data appropriately. After all – it’s coffee. There’s a bit of a limit on how seamless the coffee buying experience can get for customers versus the value of giving Peet knowing what, when and how you have your coffee.
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As I said in my comments above, the coffee shop example is an outlier. Probably conceived by a baby boomer at the helm of an organsation who cannot stem the loss of revenue and feels an app is a silver bullet.
I’m referring to big data modelling, based on among many, many other things, detailed customer interactions and data points (feedback)
Don’t get caught on the minutia here. If you feel surveys are annoying, unsubscribe. If you don’t like the intrusion of big data, go live off the grid.
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I think it’s a big jump to blame “the overall performance score for British brands has hit the lowest level in the eight-year history of the report” on feedback/engagement programs.
What about poor customer service reps, overseas call centres, cost-cutting causing pressure everywhere, product quality fails, brand confusion, quality control, pricing, value for money….shall I go on!
Perhaps they are just not asking the right questions to sort out their overall performance problems.
Ask the right questions, be honest with the feedback and make changes….that’s the only way those scores will move in the right direction!
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Hear hear. Amen to that. Take note, Coles Supermarkets (who ask me to take a survey every single bloody time I go to the supermarket)
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@Lanky, I think the point is the collection of data and/or the getting of feedback for both of their sakes because it’s become the popular kid in the marketing and customer experience playground, without any meaningful (or at worst, serious) idea on what to do with it.
Brands can call it loyalty though sometimes it takes courage to realise when a product is a low involvement commodity and there are very pragmatic purchase reasons. Make good product that satisfy the need and the feedback is you sell more and stay open (at the most base level).
From that point of view, it’s spot on.
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Bob Hoffman and Lanky Jones both raise good points.
Yes the application of big data in 21st century marketing will be broad and varied. Bob’s coffee shop experience however exemplifies how clunky and nacent the data collection process is at the moment.
A unique and persistent ID has overtaken cookies as the preferred basis for modelling and segmentation, but the initial creation of the ID at this point is still overwhelmingly a manual human entry. And in cases like Bob’s coffee purchase, thinly veiled requests for that manually obtained ID get in the way of what should be a smooth consumer experience.
Collecting customer data at the expense of customer satisfaction is counter-intuitive, especially if the end result limits the growth of the business.
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I guess that is the price you pay for the “benefits” of the FlyBuys card … (ain’t no such thing as a free lunch).
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I’m interested to know why you needed to resort to insults?
“Deluded baby boomer”, “angry old baby boomer” etc. Does nothing to further your argument or cause.
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Not quite, Bob. Brands are simply obtaining the information using ineffective and dated approaches. Recommend everyone looks into YomConnect and what they do, as the new benchmark. It’s not rocket science.
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“Consumers, on the other hand, mostly don’t give a good flying shit about their brand. They want a cup of coffee and they want it now”
I don’t think Bob has been to Melbourne!?
Whilst I agree with much of what Bob says it doesn’t apply to all Brands. Yes, most of the Brands we buy we don’t love, for two reasons.
1) We have no other choice. If I want to watch a film at a local cinema, I only have one choice.
2) It’s a low involvement purchase. I just need a product that does XYZ and Brand X is the one in front of me.
These are the ones Bob is talking about, with lots of engagement activities that just get in our way.
When it comes to Brands people love, we are happy to take part, we want to contribute, we want to be part of the success story because we identify with the Brand. Tesla asking for Feedback is not the same as Colgate, there is a big difference between Brands we want to identify with and Brands that we buy because they are there.
The important point Bob raises is Brands should be asking themselves, is all this Feedback really helping us at this moment and worth the effort?
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Agreed. I will be loyal to a brand if they service my needs well. If I can rely on them. Take Appliances Online as an example. I will never, ever purchase an appliance from anywhere else, ever again. (Unless somebody can beat them by a country mile price wise, which I doubt they can…) They deliver, they are friendly, they give me value.
Having said that I detest Gerry Harvey yet actually bought something from the Harvey Norman website only yesterday. Purely, because it was the best price I could find. I will find out in the coming days what their service is like and boy oh boy I will be reviewing publicly (Google) if it is shoddy.
Agreed with Bob re being forced to sign up or to review.
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