What's with the surveys? (Read details.)

Edit: “As if life weren’t aggravating enough.”

My guesses (based on a little knowledge and no particular related experience):

(a) Any information that contributes to a customer profile is valuable. It can be used as a marketing tool, and it can be sold.

(b) If more than one piece of information can be correlated, the data becomes more valuable, possibly even exponentially.

(c) Your rating can undoubtedly be converted into a numeric value and aggregated into a score for the product or service provider or delivery system or whatever. Quantifiable results tend to be trusted because they are “objective,” regardless of whether at bottom they reflect subjective evaluations. In the current crazed scramble for retail market share, such numbers are given undue importance.

(d) Your inconvenience and annoyance don’t figure in the equation.

I hate this shit…

And even fucking worse is newegg nagging me when I buy a hdmi cable to share my purchase on facebook and Twitter. I don’t use either service and if I did I am not going to look like a advertising bot for your shit.

If the HDMI cable on Amazon wasn’t a cheap knock-off that would give me cancer I would never shop at Newegg again.

Since I appreciate reviews of a product before I buy it, I’m always happy to supply one.

It does become tedious and I usually don’t bother. On my last visit to China I was asked to rate the immigration official who let me in. There were five buttons with faces ranging between glum and happy so I pressed the happy one and found myself in China.

People trust things that others have purchased more of than those with less sales. Since we generally can’t see sales numbers directly, if a product has 100 reviews, and the one next to it only has 10, people will gravitate towards the one with 100 reviews even if the rating is slightly lower. It’s like we don’t trust our own judgement because we’re working with limited information, but those other guys must be on to something.

So reviews are valuable from a manufacturers perspective in the same way Bestsellers lists are to publishers. It shows others made the same decision and makes us feel more confident we’re making the right choice as well.

By the same token, people will go where there are more reviews to see a consensus. For example you may have looked at something on Amazon for the reviews, even if you don’t intend to buy it there, because you know there will be a lot of them. Now if you were just going to check reviews and it happened to be 10% cheaper on Amazon too, then you’d probably go ahead and order while you’re there. But you also tend to think of stores with more reviews and having more authority in a particular area.

So reviews are valuable for the retailer as well.

It’s considered standard practice right now to request reviews automatically after a certain number of days. I’m not a fan either, but I appreciate the reviews others provide, so I’m not sure why.

Thinking it through, it feels like a (small) intrusion because of the wording most use when asking for the feedback. Also, deep down, I wish I wasn’t being tracked and measured with every purchase and things like those follow ups remind me that I am.

The thing about Home Depot is, you probably need to use the item a few weeks to decide how much you like it, and whether it feel apart after a short time.

I think part of it might be that the more reviews they get, the more the site becomes a place people go to for opinions and information. If you go to Home Depot website rather than say Consumer Reports, you’re more likely to buy from Home Depot, because you’re already there.

Plus, I’m sure they compile info on you, and send ads or whatever.

It’s just that it’s everything right now. If I take a flight, I get a survey after. If a plane got me from A to B in a timely fashion, I don’t want to give feedback. If I buy tickets online, they want me to tell them what my ticket buying experience was. It’s just too much.

next thing you know, the sidewalk will start sending me emails asking how my walk was on a scale of 1 to 10.

@janbb It wouldn’t surprise if the sidewalks do start talking. Artificial Intelligence will start listening in on our conversations in supermarkets to know what product was missing on the shelf. This is only the beginning. The information stream will get much more amped up.

^^ I fear that’s true.

@janbb I went to a lecture about it. The coming time of the Singularity. It’s scary.

I can’t even buy stamps at the post office without them wanting a survey.

@chyna It’s just gone overboard, hasn’t it? And nothing – like the airlines – seems to have improved as a result of surveys.

^^That’s a good point. Lol.