Have you ever been asked if you would like to give a company feedback on their product or service and thought, “Yes, I have some feedback for you: Shut up and leave me alone.”? It
seems that no activity – from the modest purchase of a sink plug taking five minutes at your local hardware megamart to the most complex medical procedure involving a hospital stay of several weeks – can be allowed to go by without a request for feedback to help us improve our service and better meet your needs.

Sometimes the request isn’t specific but just a general invitation to make your feelings known, as in this email that was prompted by a perfectly innocent online order of two tee shirts – and please note the shirts hadn’t been despatched let alone delivered at the time of writing:

“I’m one half of the team of two that makes up our little print shop.

I just wanted to reach out personally to say thank you for your first purchase from us.

As a small business, we appreciate your support a lot, and hope that you love your tees when they arrive.

If you have any feedback or questions about our creative process, business practices or products, just reply to this email. We’d love to hear from you.”

This premature plea hits a number of emotional pressure points. There’s the picture of the team of two – who are obviously close because they are two halves – pluckily pumping out tee shirts from their “little print shop”. They value loyalty and hope to earn it because they know this will be the buyers “first [hopefully of many] purchase”. Did half the team of two mention they are a small business? They are “a small business” who know that trigger words like “appreciate”, “support”, “hope” and “love” packed into a sentence have real impact.

If you avoid buying or doing anything to escape the feedback cycle, you are doomed to failure. Stay away and you are likely to get an only slightly menacing email beginning, “We notice you haven’t visited us for some time”. It’s a tone that would be more appropriate coming from a lonely retirement village resident than from an online shop.

There’s a version of this feedback email that ratchets up the menace level slightly with the passive aggressive query “Have we done something to offend you?” If you suffer from having a pleaser personality, you’re going to want to make even the robot who’s reading the survey results feel good about itself. You won’t mind serving as unpaid labour, providing data for the marketing department’s research team.

Underlying the feedback frenzy is an idea that is prevalent in current management theory and retail strategy – the notion that everything can be counted, categorised and parcelled up into neat conclusions. In earlier, simpler times, this function was performed by human beings having a bit of a think. Now it is done by computers or AI or algorithms or some other breakthrough du jour.

Here is part of a recent email from the head of the “Consumer Experience Team” at an organisation which was getting in touch because “In these challenging times, hearing about your recent experience … is still important to us.” As you’ll have quickly realised the organisation involved is a hospital.

There’s something extremely clinical, as it were, about this. Bear in mind, such a survey’s results will have something of a built-in bias because they will only be completed by those who have survived the medical procedure and are thus more likely to be favourably inclined towards the facility in question.

Feedback mania, and consequent survey fatigue, are symptoms of the belief that everything can be treated like a product and measured by the same criteria we apply to buying anything. Having a heart bypass is basically the same process as choosing half a dozen sausages.

Businesses who can’t come up with their own questions for customers can find plenty online, such as those in “228 Customer Feedback Questions for Your Perfect Satisfaction Survey”. As it says, “The art of asking the right questions is a skill that requires adopting the curiosity of a 4-year-old to be perfectly mastered”. Some feedback for them: just because you have the curiosity of a four-year-old doesn’t mean you should have the literacy level of one.

And to use their own phrase: “The never-ending why is the key to success in a customer-centric professional environment.” So true, who among us has not found ourselves walking around the customer-centric professional environment of a shopping mall at Christmas, never-endingly uttering: “Why? Why? Why?”

The customer may not always be right but they are always right there to be bombarded with pleas for validation.