On a scale of one to ten, how do you rate the  Customer Experience Management (CEM) business?

I give it a zero.

Have you noticed that every service comes with a bonus survey—one you answer on a phone or fill out on a Web page? And that every one of those surveys is about rating the poor soul you spoke to or chatted with, rather than the company’s own crappy CEM system?

I always say yes to the question “Was your problem resolved?” because I know the human I spoke to will be punished if I say no.  Saying yes to that question complies with Don Marti‘s tweeted advice: “5 stars for everyone always—never betray a human to the machines.”

The main problem with CEM is that it’s all about getting service to scale across populations by faking interest in human contact. You can see it all through McKinsey’s The CEO Guide to Customer Experience. The customer is always on a “journey” through which a company has “touchpoints.”

Oh please.

IU Health, my primary provider of health services, does a good job on the whole, but one downside is the phone survey that follows up seemingly every interaction I have with a doctor or an assistant of some kind. The survey is always from a robot that says it “will only take a few minutes.” I haven’t counted, but I am sure some of those surveys last longer than the interaction I had with the human who provided the service: an annoyingly looooong touchpoint.

I wrote Why Surveys Suck here, way back in 2007. In it, I wrote,  “One way we can gauge the success of VRM is by watching the number of surveys decline.”

Makes me cringe a bit, but I think it’s still true.

The image above was created by Bing Creator and depicts “A hellscape of unhappy people, some on phones and others filling out surveys.”