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Antiwork

I hate customer surveys. Ideas to fight back?

I've always kind of disliked customer experience surveys. I spent over a decade in the hotel industry, where customer surveys were basically the fucking word of the GODS. You could get disciplined over them, often when it was completely outside of your power to control the thing they were complaining about. (word up, my hotel homies, because of course the traffic, the weather, the power going out in the city, and so on is absolutely the fault of the random hotel employee making $12/hr and working 60hrs a week) Anecdotally, I feel like the reliance on surveys to manage employees has only gotten worse — and companies have gotten pushier about demanding them. In my hotel days, we were only allowed to mention the survey exactly once during our spiel, and the marketing Word From On High was that an email only went out to guests every third stay (or…


I've always kind of disliked customer experience surveys. I spent over a decade in the hotel industry, where customer surveys were basically the fucking word of the GODS. You could get disciplined over them, often when it was completely outside of your power to control the thing they were complaining about.

(word up, my hotel homies, because of course the traffic, the weather, the power going out in the city, and so on is absolutely the fault of the random hotel employee making $12/hr and working 60hrs a week)

Anecdotally, I feel like the reliance on surveys to manage employees has only gotten worse — and companies have gotten pushier about demanding them. In my hotel days, we were only allowed to mention the survey exactly once during our spiel, and the marketing Word From On High was that an email only went out to guests every third stay (or fourth, or something like that).

Now I'm getting these emails all the time, and multiple “reminders.” For a recent doctor visit, I got two emails from the software I used to book the appointment, an email from the office, and an email from the parent health provider that the office practiced under. And every time, all I can think about is how survey results so often get interpreted by management and used to retaliate against employees.

A recent email from an HVAC survey directly stated “Your technician will either be counseled privately or praised publicly based on your response,” and my skin crawled. It's just creepy to me in a way I don't have words to describe, like it's pandering to a feeling of power that people want to have over others.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to protest in some way against this practice? I'm torn between ignoring them (what I've done until now) and responding by ranking everything a 5/5 and putting in the notes how demeaning and frustrating I find the practice of doing it & demanding the survey response.

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