By Rob Pegoraro
Marketing types are turning to different tools to assess our satisfaction, and not all of them will leave you feeling satisfied about your privacy.
LAS VEGAS—The customer-satisfaction business is no longer oblivious to what may have long been obvious to many customers: Getting spammed with customer-satisfaction surveys probably won’t leave the recipient feeling particularly satisfied.
A conference here, hosted by a company that specializes in collecting and analysing customer feedback, made that clear: Customer experience (CX) research needs to move beyond the email survey. “We are more than survey people,” said Sid Banerjee, CSO of Medallia, in the keynote that opened the Medallia Experience conference.
“It’s tiring consumers out,” said Andrew Custage, head of research insights, in a panel at the show. Of course, Medallia had survey data about survey fatigue: 51% of consumers said they’d noticed more requests for feedback, and 36% said they felt too many companies were hitting them up for their thoughts. A slide shown during the panel showed that the company’s survey response rates have slipped from 10.5% in Q1 2024 to 8.6% in Q3 2025.
Custage’s fellow panellist Judy Bloch, a VP and industry executive advisor at Medallia, added that surveys can also fail to surface useful insights: “We’ve gotta expand beyond the surveys; they simply don’t tell us the full story.”
(Credit: Fahmi Ruddin Hidayat/Getty Images)
One solution for the survey-fatigue problem is to instrument sites and apps to measure customer journeys (as in, track your usage) much more precisely, then leverage AI-based tools to glean useful insights from all that data.
In another panel at the conference, Aimee Civera, head of “workplace solutions marketing engagement technology” at the investment firm Vanguard, called these heatmaps, session replays, and other forms of customer path analysis “tremendously helpful” for understanding customer interests. For example, she said, that increase in understanding helped Vanguard fix a problem with sales drop-offs on its site: “Now we’re seeing double the amount of sales leads from our website.”
Multiple speakers also endorsed feeding transcripts of customer calls and chats into analytical engines to surface patterns of what works and what doesn’t in a firm’s CX.
“EX”—employee experience—can also be a useful source of CX data, because customer-facing employees can run into problems on their side of the same systems that annoy customers.
“EX is the smoke to the fire that is CX,” said Samantha Scott, senior director of business experience at Verizon Business, in another panel. “If there’s something going on in front of the customer,” she said, “the employee’s going to be the first one to tell you about it.”
(Whether management will act on the resulting insights is another question: All of these customer insights did not stop Verizon from ratcheting up add-on fees last August.)
Surprise: People Don’t Hate Notification-Based Surveys
Or companies can try to hit up their customers for feedback outside of email. Two executives with the grocery-store firm Albertsons Companies outlined how they’ve opened a surprisingly successful survey channel via push notifications in the mobile apps for Safeway and Shaw’s.
“It’s the device push that generates the highest response rate,” said Henrik Christensen, senior director for customer and market intelligence.
He didn’t specify that rate, but his colleague, Michael Flatt, senior manager for customer and market intelligence, said about 50% of app users opt in to receive notifications about new surveys, even though this option will compound notification overload: “The customer doesn’t even have to have the app open” to get these push nags, Flatt noted.
In-app surveys also yield more constructive feedback than quick surveys conducted via touch-screen terminals at checkout lines, which Christensen said suffer from a “proximity bias,” in which people standing in front of a cashier feel compelled to accentuate the positive.
Albertsons has since added the option for customers to leave video reviews via its app, which Flatt said has proved insightful for surfacing problems like strawberries sold way too late.
(That panel didn’t get into other ways Albertsons gathers intelligence about customers, which are explained with striking clarity in its privacy policy: “Cameras and other location-aware technologies” to monitor in-store traffic and spot problems like theft or spills—plus, in some states, feed into facial-recognition systems.)
All of these other channels, Flatt said, allowed Albertsons to back away from email surveys, which, in addition to poor response rates, had one other problem in practice: Email tends to be overwhelmingly negative.
This panel, like the others I watched, ended with a QR code shown on the screens at the front of the room—an invitation for attendees to, yup, complete a survey about their experience.
If you’re itching to fill out a survey, meanwhile, consider taking part in PCMag’s Readers’ Choice. Tell us how you feel about your ISP, the income tax apps and services you use, and the PCs you use or manage at work.
Feature image credit: Teera Konakan/PCMag
By Rob Pegoraro
Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
