This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
I bought a pack of batteries last week. Within the hour, I had been asked to rate the batteries, rate the delivery, rate the person who delivered them, rate the app I used to order them and, in a touch I found almost moving, rate how easy it was to leave a rating.
I did none of these things. I put the batteries in the remote and got on with my life. And I’d like to make a modest case that the rest of us should feel free to do the same, and that companies should ask a lot less often.
Feedback has become a reflex
There was a time when being asked for your opinion felt like a small courtesy. A restaurant owner stopping by the table. A comment card you could fill out if something went very right or very wrong. It was occasional, and it was usually a human asking.
Now it’s automatic. Every transaction ends with a pop-up, an email, a text or a robot voice asking me to “press 1 if you were satisfied.” Software makes it essentially free to ask, so everyone asks about everything, all the time. The cost doesn’t go away. It just moves to us, a few seconds and a little irritation at a time.
It isn’t just stars, either. I have been asked how likely I am to recommend a parking garage to a friend. I have been asked to describe my feelings about a password reset. No friend has ever asked me for a parking garage recommendation, and if one did, I would worry about them. The questions are written as if every purchase is a relationship. Most of them are errands.
When everything is five stars, nothing is
The bigger problem is that the ratings stop meaning anything. Ask me about my battery delivery and you’ll get a shrug, translated into stars. Ask me when I’m annoyed about something unrelated and you’ll get a grumpy number that has nothing to do with the person who brought the package.
Plenty of us also know, or suspect, that anything less than perfect can land on a real worker’s record. So we tap five stars to be nice, whether or not the service was memorable. The result is a scale where five means “fine,” four means “something went wrong,” and anything lower means the courier set the box on fire. That’s not information. That’s politeness with a progress bar.
Some feedback is worth giving
I don’t want to be entirely unreasonable here, even if that is my brand. Feedback can be genuinely useful. A detailed review of a contractor helps the next person avoid a disaster or find a gem. Telling a small business that its new website broke checkout is a favor. Reporting a safety problem matters.
But that kind of feedback is specific, voluntary and rare. It happens because someone has something to say, not because an automated email arrived thirty minutes after delivery.
A few rules for the people asking
If I could hand the companies of the world a short list, it would look like this:
- Ask less. Not every interaction needs a survey. Pick the ones where you will actually do something with the answer.
- Ask once. If I ignore the first request, a second and third will not change my mind. It will only change my opinion of you.
- Make it optional, really optional. No pop-ups that block the screen, no rating prompts standing between me and the thing I came to do.
- Don’t make workers pay for it. If a single score can hurt someone’s job, the system is asking customers to make decisions they never signed up for.
- Show me it matters. If my feedback leads to a change, say so. That is the only thing that will make me want to give it again.
And a rule for the rest of us
We are allowed to say nothing. Closing the pop-up is not rude. Deleting the survey email is not a moral failing. Save your opinions for the moments when you have one, and when it might help someone.
In the meantime, the batteries work fine. I’d give them a solid “didn’t think about them,” which, for batteries, is the highest praise there is.