Generally I’m a fan of companies actually asking for customer feedback, and although I honestly don’t really respond to them very often, I think the newfound trend of soliciting feedback at the bottom of your sales receipt in exchange for a couple of bucks off your next purchase is a neat way to encourage people to give you a few minutes of their time.
That said, I think it completely defeats the point of asking for said feedback when the customer’s “reward” is conditional on them giving you the kind of feedback that you want!
This happened to me earlier this afternoon when picking up a few things from PetCo for Cleo to chew on after losing multiple pairs of shoes and several power cords to various devices over the last couple of days! Admittedly, it caught me a little off guard at the register because the cashier was extremely perky and talked really fast, but as I repeated it to myself while walking to the car, it just didn’t sit right with me…
“Call this number on the back and if you give us all 5’s, you’ll get $2 off your next purchase with us!”
Now it’s hard to tell if this is just her own shtick for explaining the survey or if she’d actually been coached to do it this way by her bosses, but it’s kind of sad and pointless for a company to gather customer feedback if it does so in a way that only garners positive results. Essentially this is just bribing customers to tell them they’re great for a $2 coupon, which is too bad because ultimately good, honest feedback should be a lot more valuable to a company than meritless pats on the back.
Of course, if the company doesn’t actually have any intent of acting on the responses anyways, then maybe it’s just better that they think they’re doing great in the first place…
🙁