“10/10! I Will Recommend Your Brand to a Friend”

If these could be my last words on my deathbed, then I’ll die happily and satisfied. There’s nothing that gives a deeper feeling of purpose, than letting each and every brand know every detail of my exact thoughts on my experience with their products.

Did you know that 83% of people surveyed during the last month of their lives ranked their highest regret as not being able to participate in more brand surveys? Here were some of the things they recall saying about surveys over the years.

“Surveys from brands are awesome. My day wasn’t complete without completing at least one.”

“I’m so glad I could tell airlines after every flight that I’d like a more comfortable seat with extra legroom toward the front of the plane yet only pay a basic economy rate. My repeated requests really seemed to make a difference. And, thank you for getting me to my destination safely.”

“I enjoyed that recent customer service call that I needed to have because your brand screwed up my bill. I’m happy to respond to the email survey about the quality of the call even though I don’t recall saying I was open to a survey. Of course, I’d love to spend more time with your brand, telling you the call was satisfactory, and explain my specific reasoning for not saying it was excellent.”

“Hooray! Here’s an email survey that doesn’t tell me how many questions or how long it might take. Sure, let me dive right in and start a survey journey not knowing how long this will take me. First, let me grab my journal, so I can record and reflect on this experience.”

“I’m sorry, son. A brand I deal with only twice a year wants my feedback on their customer service process. It’s very important to them, and they say that my responses will help them make improvements, so they can optimize their customer experience for me and millions of others. I know your baseball game is important to you, but watching you won’t improve the experiences of millions. I’ll watch you play another time.”

“Without completed surveys, brands can’t get better. It has been my duty and honor to serve so many brands. There’s no need for them to compensate me for my time. Just knowing that I could help them succeed is thanks enough.”

When told that 17% of people on their death beds were only neutral about survey experiences, 100% of survey fans said that they could have done more to promote the value of customer surveys to others. Here were some of their thoughts, and remember these people were just days away from passing away.

“Customer surveys are the lifeblood of our society. What would happen if people on vacation didn’t tell their rental car brand all about the experience of securing the car rental at an off-airport location? That information must be known by the second day of the vacation, so they can make adjustments that ensure others will have a better shuttle travel experience as quickly as possible.”

“I could have done more (surveys). I could have done more.”

“I just hope that after my family has lived a long life full of completed surveys that society comes close to reaching 100% – 100% of people on their deathbeds regretting that they didn’t complete more surveys.”

“I would trade more time with my family and friends just to complete more surveys. Brands are also my family.”

Clearly, brand surveys matter and play important roles in people’s lives. We must continue to strive to incorporate more surveys into our daily activities, and we will achieve this with technical innovation. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will enable brands to survey us in an ongoing fashion as we interact with them. The apps we use will monitor our actions, notifying us with survey questions after each brand interaction. Of course, we can control these notifications in the settings of our devices, but why would we? The evidence is overwhelming. We love customer surveys, so we should be giving as much feedback as often as possible. Nothing is more important. 

Upon passing away our devices will send a report to our next of kin, so they can put on our tombstones the number of surveys we completed. The higher the number will indicate how well-lived our lives were. Now, please return to your daily activities, and get busy completing a survey.

Brands wishing to connect with me to discuss how to improve their survey programs can contact me at: bret@kpitarget.com.

P.S. 83% is the statistic Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother often used in his examples to support his claims during the show.

P.P.S. 100% of people reading this post will know this is satire.