I work retail and I am conflicted regarding the surveys that everywhere bugs customers to do.
I know most places, anything less than a five-star/perfect rating dings the store.
Many places, employees and management get bonuses based off these surveys. Beyond that, employees often get dinged for not getting enough people to take the survey.
Combine with the fact that, often, the people taking the survey are just pissed off at the store and the people who are happy/meh about the store don't waste their time, it can be difficult to pull the survey average up.
And, to top it all off – upper management looks at the metrics of good surveys to say “Oh, everything at this location is great! Keep it up!” and bad surveys as “Gee, these employees are fucking everything up. Fire them all.” rather than actually going to the locations and seeing what the root causes of good/bad surveys are – like, maybe this location is getting bad surveys because you fucking cut their staff so much there's no one to help customers? And this location is getting great surveys because management at the store is begging friends/family to take surveys just so they get a higher bonus? (or, you have those managers who take the surveys themselves… I know one manager who used to go into the electronic journal and pull receipts and do surveys off of them to boost the overall score). This leads to either A.) upper management blaming the wrong issues (90% of bad surveys rate something bad based off their limited experience without understanding the full process that lead to their bad experience – like, I'm going to give this random cashier a bad score because the store was out of stock of my favorite peanut butter!) or nothing is going to get fixed because the store is scoring so high!
AND…. the locations that cheat their metrics make the other locations who don't cheat look bad. What do you mean you can't close with only three employees on the floor? The store the next town over does it, and look how high their scores are! You're obviously doing something wrong.
Basically, these surveys are fucked. Don't do them, don't encourage customers to do them. If upper management wants to see how well a store is running, they should visit the store. Spend a few days there. Talk to the customers. Help unload a truck. A manager who manages by metrics is a bad manager.