There is an insidious explosion of customer surveys in America.

You know what I’m talking about: when you buy a computer, the retailer sends you a survey; so does the computer company. When you order a book, a t-shirt or a box of fruit online, you are asked to complete a survey. And when you’re in “waiting hell” with a utility provider (cable folks aren’t that quick to answer that phone?), You’re asked to stay on the line even longer to answer a short survey.

Joy.

A survey is not a business-customer relationship.

If corporations spent as much time and money training employees and management to be more personable and efficient as they spend on implementing and analyzing surveys, perhaps the survey would not be necessary at all. That’s just my opinion.

So what does this explosion of mined and relieved data mean for the average manager or business executive? You already know the answer: all the data can be manipulated, most of it is bullshit, and you can probably learn to skew the numbers yourself if you’re sneaky or creative enough.

I like simple things. Simple is easy to run. Here’s an idea to ponder: Get to know your customers and employees by building (Damn, what’s their name, again? Oh yeah …) relationships with them. Build relationships with your customers. What a novel idea.

Again, that’s just my opinion. Do you want to know more about the surveys? Keep reading. Here are a few more points from an America’s Survey Hell poll:

Beware of the silent survey.

These are the most insidious of all. Many people don’t realize how much information they are giving away for free. The “Frequent Shopper” or “Discount” cards you scan at checkout are the worst. Visiting a website is also not very private. If you visit my website, I know where you live within 1000-5000 meters, what IP address I can find your computer on the web (that might be helpful, except I’m too old to be a hacker), what kind of computer you have , which browser you use (including which version), your screen resolution, how many times have you visited my website, your marital status, and what your GPA was in sixth grade. And only the last two are lies.

Fun facts.

If CareerBuilder.com didn’t survey people to find that birth order affects job choices and that 4 out of 10 American employees have gained weight in their current jobs, how could you know these important things? Also, did you know that there is a college-level course, “Questionnaire and Survey Development,” at the University of Pittsburgh? Why?

Do most people like polls?

Yes. Most people seem to like polls. Really. A 2010 TreeHugger.com poll asked, “Did we run too many polls?” Believe it or not, more than sixty percent of the 481 respondents marked “No”. You got to be kidding. Dang tree huggers …

Anyone can take a survey.

DIY survey sites like InstantSurvey, Zoomerang, and SurveyMonkey are used by legitimate organizations. But, for better or worse, now anyone can create countless online surveys using these sites. In fact, I made one. It’s at the end of the article.

Here’s the thing.

Honestly, isn’t the power of the polls diminished by their overabundance?

I once heard a marketing director where I worked say that surveys were marketing campaigns in disguise and that management confuses surveys with relationships. Prestige! I think she nailed it.

Customers often feel compelled to take a survey due to pressure from the employees who submit it. The concept is called “respondent burden.”

But as polls proliferate, potential respondents are reluctant to contribute increasing amounts of their time. Over time, people start to resent the concept and stop surveying, unless their experience has been to one extreme or the other: very dissatisfied or very satisfied. Otherwise it is not worth your time.

It all started innocently enough.

Like most scourges on the human population, this just got close to us. Years ago, if a small business wanted to know how satisfied their customers were, they just asked. For a large corporation, surveyors were hired to conduct face-to-face interviews, and a human being wandered around the store or mall with a clipboard and asked questions of those they could corner to answer.

Then in the 1970s, surveyors switched to collecting phone data and dinner time was cut off forever until caller ID, “Do Not Call” list, and cell phones allowed him to eat in peace. .

Then came Internet surveys, interactive speech recognition, and other data collection methods that involve much lower cost and faster response times for corporations thirsty for consumer information.

Are the surveys even useful?

With customer surveys, in the end, does an organization actually use the information it gets from a survey? However, is the survey an end in itself? Does the act of offering a survey show the customer “We Care”? I’d say it’s a combination of both.

Employee satisfaction surveys are even weirder than customer surveys. They often act “backwards.” In other words, when survey results reflect employee dissatisfaction, they are often completed by people who take them seriously. That’s great and helpful feedback: Employees care and want a better workplace. But when employee surveys reflect satisfaction, they are often completed by employees who just don’t care and want to get it over with. If you owned the business, which employee would you rather have? Which punctuation would you prefer: “honest-but-bad” or “I don’t care-well”? I would settle for the “honest but bad” survey.

In the end, what do all these polls mean?

The survey profession must do a better job of helping companies understand the differences between junk data and quality surveys.

To help me analyze the wave of surveys, please take a few minutes to complete the following survey. It will help me do a better job of surveying, um, I mean, serve you.

Just click the link below for a fun and easy ten question survey. And no, I am not counting the results. Feel free to vent about the polls in the “comment” box, too.

Click here: Hate Polls? Take mine!