Spin Control: Surveys are everywhere and not just at campaign time

This may sound strange coming from someone who gets paid to offer an opinion in print once a week, but I’m getting tired of being asked to take surveys from organizations asking “How are we doing?”

I’m not talking about political surveys asking how the president, governor or Legislature is doing. I have opinions on that but don’t take those surveys as a matter of ethics because I might wind up writing about the results, and there are problems with being both an observer and a participant.

But there are plenty of other groups pushing surveys.

I go to the doctor and my health care provider emails me a survey. This is different from the preappointment questionnaire sent before the visit that covers a series of standard medical situations or the questionnaire at the beginning of the appointment that asks some of the same things. There’s a faint suspicion they are asking the same question twice to see if I change my answer. But it’s my health, and I like my doctor and the rest of the staff, so I gladly oblige both the questionnaires and the post-visit ratings.

I fill or refill a prescription from the same provider and they send another survey asking to rate their online pharmacy service. I am not as fond of that service or its responsiveness to queries, and I say that again in the survey with some suggestions for improvement in the spaces provided. But I don’t expect changes and so far my expectations have been met.

I return from vacation, pick up the car from a long-term parking lot near the airport, and by the time I get home, I get a text from the online parking reservation system asking me to fill out a customer survey.

The next day the hotel chain sends an email requesting “just a few minutes for some questions” which turn out to be about 10 minutes to rank everything from the food to the concierge service to the gardeners who tended the grounds. On a scale of 1 to 5. And if it’s less than 5, could I please explain what they could have done better.

I go to the liquor store to restock the wine rack and they send me an email asking me how likely I am to recommend their establishment to a friend – this time on a scale of 1 to 10. And if I answer, they want me to answer a more detailed survey.

I take the car in to the dealership for an oil change and they send me a survey to rate their service, along with a note about two other routine maintenance items they couldn’t do. I fill out the survey with a mention that those routine items didn’t get done because they didn’t ask me before taking the car off the lift, and I had to schedule another appointment.

After that work is done, I get another survey asking me to rate their service for that visit. I defer, because the car sometimes makes a strange noise when it starts, and if that keeps up I’ll be taking it back in. And I can address everything in the next survey that will be emailed to me.

What’s common to all of these situations is that my health care provider, the hotel chain, the online parking reservation system, the liquor store and the dealership are all connected to bigger regional or national organizations that undoubtedly have a set of system-wide metrics to measure performance. Mom and pop operations usually don’t need such devices because the owner, CEO and manager – sometimes all the same person – are right there to receive daily feedback.

The surveys are usually designed to be easily tabulated and analyzed, hence the rate-by-number requests. Woe betide any service or department that scores below the mean.

The first time a company sought my opinion through an online survey, I thought “It’s nice that they care.” The more surveys that are prompted by seemingly routine situations like buying a few bottles of wine or getting an oil change, the more that feeling fades.

In the run up to next year’s general election, there will be plenty of stories on political polls, and more than a few on how it is increasingly harder to put together a valid sample. The experts will blame the switch from landlines to cellphones, the growth among certain age demographics of online communications like texting, the problem of catching busy people at a time when they can be polled and lack of trust in the political system.

Maybe they should consider that many people are getting surveyed out, and might not want to spend time doing yet another one.