One week last autumn, I hit my customer feedback limit.

I had seen my doctor and done some online shopping. Then I went on a vacation to Europe that involved three airlines and three hotel stays. At every turn, I was bombarded with dozens of requests for feedback, often multiple times from the same company, for two or more aspects of the same interaction.

“How did we do?” “How was registration?” “Rate your doctor!” “Tell us about your flight!” “What did you think of our meal offerings in the Terminal 4 lounge?” “How was check-in at your hotel?” And this doesn’t include the little four-facial-expression thingamajigs in airport restrooms that ask you to rank cleanliness by touching them. ENOUGH!!!

Americans have long been bombarded by customer experience surveys. But if you feel that it has gotten worse—much worse—in recent years, it’s not your imagination.

Last month, Qualtrics, a software company that helps organizations collect feedback, said the total number of customer and employee interactions processed on its platform has doubled since 2023, and that it now captures and analyzes more than 3.5 billion conversations and interactions annually. That includes surveys, but also call center conversations, chat logs, survey responses, social media posts, and product reviews. According to research firm IBIS World, U.S. firms will have spent $36.4 billion this year on market research, an expense that has been rising almost 4% a year.

“Survey fatigue is real,” says Brad Anderson, President of Product and Engineering at Qualtrics. He acknowledged that many emailed survey requests have devolved into spam, making people feel overwhelmed. “It’s things like, the same brand is bombarding an individual over and over again.”

And even as the common consumer becomes increasingly exasperated by the endless stream of feedback request emails, marketing experts say they don’t even work particularly well. “If only all of this email besiegement was leading to meaningful insights,” says Peter Fader, a professor at the Wharton School of Business and an expert in customer analytics. “But it rarely does.”

For one thing, surveys tend to over-index for rants and raves: People are so exasperated with their interaction or with the persistent, nagging emails that they might answer in an angry way. And when a consumer is happy with their product or service, he or she is much likelier to want to fill out a survey to give credit where due. But the large swath of views between those strong opinions are much harder to capture.

“You’re getting a very biased view, simply because there’s survey overload,” says New York University marketing professor Priya Raghubir.

A short history of “customer obsession”

Asking customers what they like and dislike after a transaction is nothing new of course. In the first half of last century, as businesses grew in scale in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, they would send standardized questionnaires by mail in massive numbers, refining the research tools to glean insights.