It seems that everyday you can not escape the request for feedback.  Whether this is presented in the form of an employee satisfaction survey, or the desire for a merchant/retailer/child/next door neighbours dog to understand how well they’ve done.

After purchasing some software on-line, I wasn’t prepared for the number of requests for feedback that followed.  It started off with the standard request for 10 minutes of my time to complete a “How well did we do survey.”  I typically ignore them.  What surprised me was the frequency and almost nag like approach that followed.  I received several reminders which went along the lines of :-

“This is a brief reminder that there are only a few days left to participate in Company X’s brief 10 minute on-line survey about your recent purchase experience. Your evaluation of our performance is extremely valuable and we consider this to be important feedback on what we need to do to meet your expectations.”

I love the wording, it’s almost like act now as we are doing you a favour.  Now don’t get me wrong, if I want to provide you feedback, rest assured I will.  Equally if you want me to spend 10 minutes of my time, then there has to be some kind of reward at the end of it.  For example, additional bonus download content, money off vouchers for something that’s actually useful or even the promise of a free future upgrade. 

Talking of feedback, years ago, a company sent a mail shot to everyone in it’s marketing database, they even provided freepost envelopes for prospective customers to respond to.  One “customer” clearly had enough of this spam/marketing bumpf arriving at his door.  So he carefully wrapped up two engineering bricks with the marketing material and brown paper, using the free post address back to the company.  To this day, that individual doesn’t know the extent of his payback.  The heavy parcel cost the receiving department around £10 in postage, which in the early 90’s was a lot of money.  However the two senior managers, one from marketing the other from the receiving department had the biggest stand-up row/fisticuffs in the office whilst arguing who was going to pay the postage bill.  Needless to day, that individual was removed from the marketing database and hopefully didn’t hear from that company again.

I’m not condoning the actions of that person, but looking back, that was very funny.  These days we have the Telephone and Mailing Preference Services to prevent us from being spammed.

http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/

Sadly, there isn’t an effective service to filter out the email spam for Viagra and Cialis …