Customer Satisfaction Surveys- Are They Worth Taking the Time to Do?

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It seems every time I go out these days and buy something my receipt gets longer and longer. It’s not because I’m buying a lot of things (okay not usually), but I’ve noticed a growing trend that at the end of the receipt there will be a customer satisfaction survey.

Usually they want to know ‘how they did’ and there is a monthly chance to win a gift card to the store. Sometimes they’ll offer you a discount for the next time you shop, but that often requires you to go into that store again within a specific time frame and it’s often less than a month. And in that cases, it’s generally not a retailer that you would frequent again so soon.

When they first starting using these you accessed them by phoning a toll free number. I did it once and it was, in all honesty, exhausting. Press 1 for this or 4 for that, and so many choices. Of course I never won a thing. Now I notice you can tell them about your shopping experiences online where they use survey software to record your responses.

So now I’m curious as to how many people actually go online and fill these out. I mean, I don’t…but maybe I should? If everyone else is like me, then maybe the odds on winning one of these $500 gift cards is pretty good!

I might like them better if they did it by demographics. Meaning they gave out so many gift cards to random respondents depending on a geographic area. That would probably be more beneficial to the actual physical store that was shopped in too, because it would give people more incentive to fill the surveys out.  That would translate into better feedback about their employees and their specific store.

Do you occasionally or regularly go to the website address on your receipt and share your thoughts on the shopping trip and purchases you made? Or do you come home and file (or toss!) your receipts, without ever thinking about doing a survey if the store had one? If you do fill out the surveys, have you ever won anything, or are the discounts given lucrative enough to bother? I’m wondering if I’m actually missing out on a good thing?