James Siminoff

Surveying your customers to death… (part 2)

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I just posted about surveying your customers, today I received a great example of what I was talking about this survey email from Gogo Inflight Internet (They are the people supplying the wifi that I love so much on certain American Airlines/Virgin America flights):

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Dear James,

Recently, you were invited to purchase a Gogo® Monthly Pass. In an effort to continually adjust our services to fit our customer needs, we invite you to provide your feedback. Your comments and suggestions are very important to us! This survey will only take you 3 to 4 minutes to complete.

Please note you will not be asked to provide any personal information during the survey, and your answers will be kept strictly confidential.

Just follow this link to complete the survey.

If you have any questions, please call 1-877-247-5688 or email customercare@gogoinflight.com.

Happy Travels! *-)-

Gogo Customer Care

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I find the above survey totally unreasonable. Why?

1.  I have spent $93.36 (thanks Mint.com) since March 15th.

2.  I am their customer, not their employee, so why are they asking me to work for free?

3.  My email box is already bankrupt, and this just ads to that.

4.  The cost of their monthly unlimited service is $49.95 per month plus a 7 month commitment.  I spend an average of $33 per month, without any commitment.  So in essence they are asking me why I do not want to spend an extra $13 per month and have a commitment.

5.  A short time ago, I had an issue with their service on a flight.  From that incident I spoke to their customer service 3 times.  In those interactions they got more info from me then what their survey could ever get.  So they are asking me to take an extra 4 minutes out of my day to redo information that they are too lazy to correlated.

6.  I have blogged about their service.  Instead of getting a “Thank you” letter from management for spreading the word about the product I get the above.

Customer service is a great way for companies to get a real time temperature of their customer base, additionally things like, Google Alerts, TweetBeep, Blogs, etc. can complete the picture.

If management at Gogo wants to really know about their customers and the experience then they should get off their lazy asses and take all of the information that they can gather without any customer input as a first step.  In the end that information is much more powerful then surveys which can be highly skewed anyway and would not make their customers feel like employees.