This obituary was written by Nate Sanders, the co-founder and CEO of Artifact, the customer experience forecasting company.

The Survey, a long beloved method of gathering customer feedback, passed away peacefully earlier this year at the age of 100ish.

Experts said The Survey had weakened in recent years, withering away due to irrelevance and a slew of biased, incorrect data. Its death was mercifully brought about by the advancement of AI.

Born in the early 1920s to Daniel Starch, who is widely credited with fathering the notion of market research, the survey became the first tool to get feedback from customers specifically on products and advertising. He would raise The Survey from infancy, together becoming a prominent, popular team with companies big and small. Over the years, The Survey matured, with the first formal marketing survey developed at the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan in 1946, according to the LA Times.

For the next eight decades, The Survey was a force. It grew from man-on-the-street interviews to mailings and nightly calls on landline phones. With the advancement of the internet, The Survey became even more ubiquitous, customer comment links showing up on nearly every sales receipt, and “tell us how we did” QR codes now as common as cars on the road.

The Survey, a Customer Hall of Fame inductee, lived a long, happy, and successful life. For a century, The Survey served as the most utilized method to attain customer attributes. It is hard to think of a support interaction that isn’t followed with a request for feedback.

Unfortunately, that led to The Survey being easily ignored, with responses becoming sparse and lacking in context. In later years, The Survey was no longer an adequate means of understanding the customer because it no longer reflected the full scope of the customer’s current state of mind, leaving them feeling frustrated and unheard. Companies that continued to rely on The Survey unwittingly left themselves deaf to the true voice of the customer.

Even those close to The Survey would privately admit that The Survey had lost its innovative edge before its inevitable passing.

While The Survey was able to tell product and customer experience teams if a consumer was extremely satisfied or very satisfied on a five-point scale, or get limited answers to specific questions, new AI tools surfaced insights that allowed companies to know the customer’s voice in real time, and understand what actions to take, 6-7x faster, with information delivered in real time.

The Survey saw the end coming and tried to pivot, becoming shorter, with companies begging for responses, offering rewards and enticements, darn near giving away the store to get customer feedback.

The strategic shift did not save The Survey.

According to The Future of CX (Customer Experience), a McKinsey study, only 7% of customers respond to surveys. Of those responses, far too many were biased towards emotional sentiment, not actionable intelligence, which is why the study also said that 84% of customer experience (CX) leaders do not think surveys allow them to address the root causes of problems and performance.

84%!

The Survey could deliver customer attributes, but it could never synthesize the information and tell brands what to do next. The Survey, once the darling of marketing professionals, had already been put out to pasture by product and customer teams who need real time information.

The best AI solutions can take the entirety of the feedback, not just from one source like The Survey, but also from apps, chats, reviews, social media, and hundreds of other inputs, and contextualize all the unstructured text into understandable, actionable information.

Whereas The Survey could only garner responses to questions it asked, AI tools can listen to everything customers are saying – in any way they are saying it – and distill that information in a way that leads to fast decision making. For example, the best AI platforms have the ability to listen to millions of feedback sources and surface pointed insights such as, “My treadmill Wi-Fi disconnects during my run” or “Shoppers in San Diego can’t use the coupons on the app.” That level of detail means executives can truly understand what their customers are saying and react accordingly, leading to a massive increase in customer satisfaction.

AI can perform dozens, if not hundreds, of different tasks that will give brands a clearer picture of their customers’ needs and wants, a better understanding of products that will keep customers loyal, and surface information that allows companies to modernize their approach to customer service and product development.

The Survey couldn’t keep up. Towards the end, critics said The Survey became an embarrassment, trying too hard to hold onto relevance, a performer unaware it was time to leave the stage.

Sadly, some companies are still using The Survey posthumously.

But forward-thinking, customer-obsessed companies have paid their due respects and moved on.

Services will be open to the public.

In lieu of responses, please send flowers.

This obituary was written by Nate Sanders, the co-founder and CEO of Artifact, the customer experience forecasting company.

About Nate

Nate Sanders is a product development enthusiast and lover of all things user and customer experience. Nate has worked with early to mid-stage SaaS startups for most of his career, accruing strong heuristics around how products people love and want are actually built. Nate is dogmatic about the fact that teams should ship opinionated theories instead of conjectures. Nate has worked with startups like Degreed, BambooHR, Canopy, Pluralsight and current is the CEO & Cofounder of Artifact, where he has championed and built the product team and user centered processes from the ground up.

Check out Artifact and please send messages of condolence to Nate on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Rob van der Meijden from Pixabay