At 12 years old, customer service and experience expert Shep Hyken started his first business as a birthday party magician. It was then that his parents first instilled in him the importance of customer feedback.
“One of the things my mom told me [was to] write a thank you note,” Hyken, now the chief amazement officer for Shepard Presentations, told Straight Arrow News. “My dad says, ‘Follow up with a phone call. Make sure they were happy.’”
His father’s advice expanded from there, directing Hyken not just to ask whether they liked the show, but to dig into the details of their experience and shape his nascent business with their feedback.
“My dad said, ‘Listen to the tricks that they like the best. And you know you’re doing a good show. But also listen for tricks that they don’t talk about. That means they weren’t worthy of being recognized as being something great, and start to replace those tricks with tricks that are talked about,’” Hyken shared.
“Little did I know that’s called getting feedback, hence a survey, and then acting on it,” Hyken continued. “In other words, creating a better product, operational improvement, process improvement.”
Ensuring customer satisfaction has evolved a lot in the decades since Hyken made follow-up calls to parents recovering from children’s parties. Now, customer satisfaction is gauged through surveys at the end of nearly every interaction.
When did customer surveys go mainstream?
Measuring customer satisfaction took a turn shortly after the turn of the 21st century. In a 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Fred Reichheld made the case for his “Net Promoter Score” (NPS). Reichheld’s single-question survey was simple: It asked customers to rate how likely they were to recommend a business to someone else on a scale from 0 to 10.
More than 20 years later, more than two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies use it as a metric.
“We connected this to fundamental strategy, as well as customer experience and satisfaction, but at the core is your business enriching the lives of customers and starting this chain reaction of them coming back for more,” Reichheld, who now serves as a Bain fellow, told Straight Arrow News.
“Up until that point, we used physical realities, like customers coming back for more, retention rates, but that was limiting, because it was too late in the process,” Reichheld said.
The NPS takes the percentage of “promoters,” people who rate the business at a nine or 10 on the survey, and subtracts from it the percentage of “detractors,” the customers who rated the business from 0 to 6.
“That Net Promoter Score turned out to be very predictive of who would grow faster and more profitably,” Reichheld added. “We use a one-question survey because I basically hate surveys.”
Eventually, Reichheld added two more questions asking why the customer gave their review, and if they fell into the “promoter” category, what the business could do to improve.
“My daughter convinced me to add [the] third question,” he told SAN. “Her name’s Jenny. It’s called the Jenny question. And that turns out to be very powerful because they are your advocates who want you to do better.”
Net Promoter Score detractors
When Reichheld developed his system, he said businesses should use it to figure out what “delights” customers. But instead, he says some businesses use it to focus on negative interactions.
“The Net Promoter system has ironically been focused on fixing detractors,” he told SAN. “I didn’t call it Net Promoter so that people would focus on detractors. It’s creating promoters. Ninety percent of the value in the Net Promoter process is treating people so they come back for more and bring their friends.”
Great service is crucial to breeding repeat customers, an important group of consumers who spend more money at a given business. Data shows customers are more likely to be loyal to brands with prompt and sufficient complaint resolution, according to community management software company Khoros. Meanwhile, 73% of customers said that after a bad customer service experience, they would rather do business with a competitor, according to customer service platform Zendesk.
Though Reichheld’s system to measure customer satisfaction has become an industry standard, some experts say they don’t see the value.
“We don’t really know what that number actually measures,” Nick Lee, a professor of marketing at Warwick Business School in the U.K., told SAN. “Does it really measure your satisfaction, or your likelihood of recommending, or is it just a generalized kind of happiness with what you’ve just experienced?”
Lee contends there are better ways to measure customer satisfaction scientifically, but those methods tend to be more complicated. And studies show longer surveys run the risk of not only turning off customers, but also turning them away.
When asking for feedback becomes ‘intrusive’
Twenty-six percent of customers said they stopped doing business with a company because it sent too many customer satisfaction surveys, according to Hyken’s 2025 State of Customer Service and CX report. Another 24% said they have stopped doing business with a company because their customer satisfaction survey was too long. Sixty-four percent said they will abandon the survey if it is too long.
“If you’ve ever designed questionnaires, which I’ve done for a long time, it is very tempting to just add in another question,” Lee said. “If you get enough people in the room with enough seniority, they’ll say, ‘I really want to know this.’”
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One in four customers said they stopped doing business with a company because it sent too many customer satisfaction surveys.
“So [it] just grows and grows and grows. And at no point does someone sit down and say, ‘We need to take stuff out,’” Lee continued. “It’s very easy to add stuff in, and then it becomes hard to take stuff out, because often that stuff’s tied to some performance metric all of a sudden.”
Reichheld, who drew the line at three questions for his own system, said he understands the temptation to add on.
“I think market researchers are desperate for more information,” Reichheld said. “If they find a customer who’s gullible enough to answer the one or two questions on how likely [they are to] recommend [a company], then they say, if they’ve got you, they can ask 50 other questions. It’s sad.”
“I’m intrusive,” Hyken said of lengthy customer surveys. “I’m taking valuable time away from you. I’m asking you for a favor. And what did I really do to deserve that?”
Do perks work?
Thirty-seven percent of customers said they will only complete a satisfaction survey if they are offered a discount, bonus or chance to win a prize, according to Hyken’s report. But solicitation can skew the results. Forty-two percent of customers said the incentive prompts them to give a higher-than-deserved rating.
Meanwhile, customers are more willing to complete a survey if they’ve had a positive experience with the business. And 59% of customers say they’ve been asked for a positive review or high rating before the end of their interaction.
“So either I’m going to give them a high score or I’m just going to not bother filling it in, because I don’t want to give them a high score, and I don’t want to feel like a bad person,” Lee said of being asked for a positive review.
“What bothers me isn’t whether they’re a good or bad company,” Hyken said, “it’s how often they’re surveying me.”
To solve the issue of survey fatigue, Reichheld says it’s time to go back to the basics and focus on behavior.
“When a new customer comes in the door and says a referral was the primary reason they came in,” Reichheld said, “that’s the magic moment when learning should take place.”
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Author: Brent Jabbour
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