Respondents are customers

A few months back we published a diary of my time spent completing as many online surveys as I could for a month. My main conclusion was that the respondent experience was, generally, pretty dreadful.

It seems pretty obvious that researchers should be treating respondents like customers – in fact they should be treating them even better, since respondents don’t really get anything out of it taking part – they’re essentially doing your company a favour.

But then it occurred to me that customer service is hardly without its problems. Everyone has their call centre horror stories, and poor service increasingly seems to be the norm, not the exception. I began to wonder whether these two phenomena – poor service for paying customers and poor treatment of research respondents – had similar origins.

Funnily enough James Surowiecki of Wisdom of Crowds fame has a piece in the New Yorker in which he asks why customer service is so bad.

“Most companies have a split personality when it comes to customers,” Surowiecki writes. They might talk about service being important, but because unhappy customers usually don’t complain, businesses can continue treating customer service simply as a cost centre. “It’s tricky to quantify the impact of good service,” he adds.

This results in a gulf between companies and customers – most companies think they provide “superior” service, while only a small proportion of their customers think they do.

Other problems are that most companies are differentiating on price, because that’s what people really want (luxury goods makers, for example, find it fairly easy to provide good service). Surowiecki also believes many companies have an excessive focus on trying to attract customers at the expense of retaining the ones they already have.

I wondered whether Surowiecki’s explanations might apply to the way research respondents are treated too. Let’s see how his ideas would translate:

It’s tough to measure ROI on respondent experience, so it’s treated as a cost centre
We know plenty of market researchers who make their livings measuring ROI, so it can’t be that hard. But we can also believe that there are many firms who haven’t seen the light on this one, particularly end clients and research agencies who buy sample from external providers, so don’t have to worry so much about annoying panel members anyway.

Companies believe they’re providing good experience even when they’re not
In our experience, researchers tend to believe that while their own company has quality under control, everyone else doesn’t. They can’t all be right.

Price is the real differentiator – service comes a distant second
The key point here is that in research, the price is paid by the research client, not the respondent. A buyer will pay close attention to the price they pay – how it might have felt for someone else to complete the survey is a somewhat less tangible concept.

Companies focus on attracting respondents but not retaining them
Panel companies seem to be getting better at this, but they can’t control everything. Agencies (whose names respodents are less likely to recognise) and end clients (from whom respondents are unlikely to receive multiple surveys) have less to lose from offering a poor experience.

I’m not sure I buy all of Surowiecki’s explanations of why customer service is so poor, but it’s interesting that when we apply his arguments to respondent experience, a pattern emerges: a poor experience results when none of the various players involved in research takes responsibility. Respondents, clients, agencies, panel providers, and the industry as a whole all have different priorities, but if they were to talk to each other and work together more, they’d find plenty of common ground, and they’d all benefit.

Unfortunately, this might mean having some difficult conversations – Annie Pettit’s argument that agencies should “refuse to launch surveys that are too long, too boring, too badly worded”, is an example of one player taking responsibility for the whole experience. But saying no isn’t always easy.