Had a great shopping experience the other day. Having just upgraded my home Macs to Leopard, I was anxious to test TimeMachine (Mac’s new back-up system) and needed a new external hard drive since TimeMachine wanted to erase everything on my old hard drive. Dashing to BestBuy.com, I quickly identified the drive of choice (a whopping 750 gig WD model that was under $300), and clicked the buy now button. Given the choice of shipping or picking up at a store 9 blocks from my apartment, I selected the latter. Five minutes later I got an email confirming the product was indeed waiting for me at my local Best Buy and that I simply needed to bring my ID and a print out of the email. So far so good.
A few hours later, I dropped by the store, found the pick-up counter and walked out with my hard drive in a less than five minutes. It was a mini-miracle. By the way, when I got home, it took less than five minutes to install the drive and set TimeMachine into motion. This was truly an amazing shopping experience. From the online ordering process all the way through the in-store pick-up, everything was easy and speedy.
So, when BestBuy sent me a customer satisfaction survey via email, I felt compelled to share my positivity. And for the first few questions the glow of satisfaction overwhelmed any misgivings. But then the survey kept going. All told they asked 37 questions. Holy cow! It took me longer to complete the questionnaire than it did to buy and pick-up my gear. Half of the questions were redundantly and few of them will provide any actionable insight which, of course, is the purpose of the survey.
Here’s a new rule for you e-researchers out there. Never make the survey longer than the shopping experience. It annoys the customer, even the ones that were gloriously happy. Short and sweet is the way to go. If you find the customer isn’t happy after a few questions, then you can always ask them for more detail later on. This will also impress this customer and hopefully prevent them from sharing their disappointment with others. If they are happy, you will know based on their willingness to recommend your service to a friend (a la Net Promoter Score). Short and sweet.