No, Surveys Aren’t Enough to Understand Your Customer

If we want to know how people react to our products and services, we need a new approach ASAP

Pavle Marinkovic
Nerd For Tech
Published in
5 min readJan 31, 2021

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Photo by Anemone 123 from Pixabay

We all have filled out at least one survey in our lives. We’ve been asked to rate a product or service, fill out a customer satisfaction survey, assess our work environment, and the list goes on.

All these surveys have three basic premises:

  • The respondents know exactly how they feel.
  • The respondents can communicate those feelings.
  • The respondents always tell the truth.

Without these assumptions, polls would be meaningless.

The information you’ve gathered wouldn’t be useful to make decisions and prepare improvement plans. Any changes to your product or service based on people's opinions would be unproductive.

These premises entail several difficulties and the good ol’ surveys have not been able to solve them. We continue to work under this "fictitious reality" and the data is not reliable.

Our marketing is based on half-truths, so to whom are you really appealing?

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