Feedback,I am told,is like a delicious dish for service providers.That's all very well for those that receive it,but where is the reward for those that give it? I'm pretty tired of getting back from a business trip and finding my inbox filled with every supplier that I used asking for my commentary on their services.The airline,my car hire and the hotels I stayed at all use their possession of my email address to send their requests for my opinion.
If I am sufficiently bothered to click into their surveys,I reckon I could waste a good half an hour ticking boxes and adding remarks.Some of these requests for my observations suggest I might win a prize by being added to a draw.Who,I wonder,ever wins? Are there lists of those who benefit? I doubt it.
Why are we getting this constant deluge（接连不断）of requests to help businesses improve themselves? Hotels are the worst.It never happened 30 years ago and I blame the Internet.Ever since that innovation,hotel chains have been using electronic survey tools to track guest satisfaction and monitor quality among their properties.Based on an analysis of chains that have purchased the industry guest satisfaction surveys by JD Power,hotel brands with higher scores apparently make more money than those with lower ones.
Well,that makes sense, and it proves that these surveys are just a cheap way of asking me to improve someone else's enterprise.And while the business traveller might think that their suggestions are being taken into account to improve their future experiences,it's actually only the scores in the boxes that are being used by an anonymous head office to monitor operational management's effectiveness.
The pressure is on the operator to keep satisfaction high, and numbers can be manipulated by the design of the questions and the focus of the form.Trend history shows that respondents （调查对象）consistently rate facility higher than service.Removing some of the questions about service and adding a few about the quality of the bedding can spin the overall scores positively.
Wherever service is involved,it appears that satisfaction scores fall. The School of Hotel Administration at Comell University has produced a number of studies of such surveys that show a 20% drop in approval ratings between physicaI facilities and service.
All of this seems to indicate that surveys can be designed to fit whatever the originator wishes to hear.
Which part of customers' feedback matters most to hotels according to the author?