Let Down By Customer Surveys

Almost every sale, citizen enquiry and support request now seems to lead to being asked to complete an online customer survey. Almost without exception, the user experience, privacy and security of these online customer surveys are worse than the service being asked to comment on. Here are a couple of customer surveys I was asked to complete last week.

Problems with using SSL, such as shown above, do occur but more often than not people are asked to submit personal identifiable information and other forms of personal data without the use of SSL. Bad layout, poorly designed questions, missing privacy notices and improper validation are extremely common. Many forms have mis-configured web sites that give away sensitive information about how the site and server are set up when they don't work:

And on Saturday I was given a coupon given at a shop's physical checkout to provide feedback on how they did with the chance of winning an iPod or cash for doing so. Yesterday I typed in the URL from the coupon, entered the required store code, and... that was the end of that marketing exercise:

I didn't time out as the message suggested, unless you have less than 5s to answer one question. Perhaps there is only one custom error page for all server-side errors, or the wrong error page is assigned? Points for hiding internal error messages, but still a failure.

Is 3/3 customer surveys tried in the last fortnight broken just bad luck? Or does it indicate a poor standard of such efforts? One of these is an international consumer brand, another a major UK High Street retailer and the other, a medium-sized business services company. I can't quite remember the the previous customer survey to these three, but I think it may have been a salary/skill survey. That had poorly thought-out questions and although it didn't obviously fail, it did ask me to log in on submission. So I'm not sure if that meant my efforts had been saved or not.

Do all these problems and errors mean the data from other people's forms that were successfully submitted (if any) are less valid? I can imagine management decisions are being made as a result of the survey feedback (if not, why waste everyone's time?). What is the effect on data quality? It could be that some forms fail when a particular answer is selected or left blank—this could be important marketing knowledge, and if no responses include the particular option it may be incorrectly assumed no-one selected it. The management decisions will be being based on poor data.

Perhaps part of the problem is that customer surveys are often managed, operated and hosted by third parties due to the ease of implementation. But "easy" doesn't mean it meets your own organisation's standards, or general good practice. You are still accountable for the web issues and it's your organisation's reputation that will be affected detrimentally.

Good design, privacy and security impact assessments, thorough testing and verification are required like any other other addition to a web site. Analytics should be used to track survey users through forms and this data combined with server logs of access and errors generated by the web server. Prove your marketing data are valid before you use it in business decisions.