Customer surveys are a frequently abused and misused tool, in my experience. To learn something valuable, you have to do them right, which means creating a research question to be answered. Of course, we know that any customer-satisfaction metric is tied to critical business-performance metrics, which would clearly be part of the survey. But depending on your business, there are probably a number of other topics you want to know about your customers’ experience with you and with your competitors. Developing a good customer survey is critical, and if the survey doesn’t answer important questions, it probably isn’t worth the expense of getting a high survey-return rate. Most businesses have ineffective surveys, so they’re better off not getting them to the right people, who might take a dislike to such a clumsy company.