6 Dysfunctions of Using a Survey as a North Star Metric
We love our data and we need it to make decisions. Surveys can be a valuable tool, when used sparingly and directed to the right people and under the right circumstances. However, when their results are used to try to systematically guide the behavior of your team, they don’t work very well. Surveys are subjective proxies that can lead to dysfunction for many reasons. Let’s explore a few of them.
1. They are disruptive 100% of the time.
It is tempting to want to survey everything as often as possible, but it takes a toll on your customer’s experience. Surveys can be a useful tool, but they are often abused. In the worst cases, companies are interrupting their customers during or after every other experience in the name of the latest statistical trends, like the Net Promoter Score. The voice of the customer and understanding the customer experience is an important and necessary part of innovation, but surveys are almost always intrusive and annoying.
When I ask the leaders in my workshops to raise their hands if they love to get surveys, no hands go up. The industry even has a term for this. It is called “survey fatigue.” The moment you have people who decide not to take your survey, you end up with survivorship bias. Nassim Taleb, Ph.D., calls this “silent evidence,” in…
