Taking an Honest Pulse (or, Surveys, Empathy, Meaning, Oh My!)
Nothing says bad faith like a customer survey. Just to keep my cynicism alive and well, I agreed yesterday to “stay on the line” after a half hour of wrangling with my health insurer. I was transferred to an oddly snarky-seductive robot that requested I rate two aspects of my “experience”: the likelihood on a scale of one to ten that I'd recommend Insurance Behemoth to a friend, and how I felt on a scale of one to four about the service I received from my agent. I was given no opportunity to explain why I’d given those ratings or to talk with anyone else, and after the bot’s no-longer-sexy peremptory “Thank you, goodbye,” ended the call, I hung up convinced I’d just filled a few more minutes of my life with total inanity.
I’m obviously not alone in feeling both sick of and insulted by ubiquitous customer surveys; in about a tenth of the time it took me to complete my task with the agent, I found a slew of commentary about their disingenuous and maddening use.1 Does anyone ever look at these things? Does anyone ever manage to leave descriptive feedback on phone surveys, and in any case, does the surveying company ever do anything in response to these mostly meaningless numbers it collects? After all, receiving consistently abysmal satisfaction scores would at least indicate that something needs to change. Based on the reliably awful experience of dealing with just my health insurer, though, I’m assuming the answer to that last question is no. At best, a company may slap up a cheery post on its website declaring they’ve earned “8/10 stars for customer service!” At worst, they won’t say anything; in both cases, it’ll probably be business as usual.
Here’s the funny-sad thing about one of the articles I found, though, over at Psychology Today, where the piece was included in the site’s “empathy” category. Its author, marketing professor Utpal Dholakia, seems to view the problem as one of bad survey design and poor follow-through, a disappointment to “relationally oriented customers”—not as one of businesses feeling compelled to ask customers about every little motivation and reaction involved in buying groceries or getting a colonoscopy.2 While he’s right about the general disingenuity of customer surveys leading to their becoming less and less useful, I think 1) he might be using the concept of empathy to describe what should just be basic respect and transparency,3 and 2) something bigger is happening here—something Jane Jacobs spoke to in her paean to connected urban neighborhoods, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.4
Conduct your life in a walkable neighborhood in which you have mundane, yet regular interaction with the neighbors and the owner of the corner store and the mailman, and you’ve built up a living “web of public respect and trust” in which customer surveys would be ridiculous and probably insulting.5 Instead of an overly eager plea to give a few ratings to vague categories, you can catch up on the news or learn about something in a brief conversation with the cashier, but can also be on your way if you’re in a hurry. In this situation, a “relationally oriented customer” would linger for a few minutes to see how the shop owner’s kid did in his track meet, not hand out a rating to be logged in a database.
I often also find myself longing for the days of yore when you could go to the store—suburban, urban, or otherwise—for a new pair of shoes, and the fact that you bought said pair indicated you were at least satisfied enough to spend money at the place. If you had a concern, you talked to the manager, and that face-to-face interaction, while maybe uncomfortable or worse, at least provided a situation in which both (or more) parties could read each other’s reactions, ask for clarification, or at least put a name to a face, a face that might greet you next time you came in. But if no reason to lodge a complaint or anything else presented itself, you walked in and out, and no one knew anything else about you other than maybe your name and credit card number, and they didn’t want or need to know anything else; thanks for your purchase.6
But I get it: insurers and so many other enterprises deal with way too many people to even dream of face-to-face interactions, or even phone conversations. I suspect that one of the irksome things about surveys may be an unspoken longing for actual human response and interaction that’s just not possible on the scale according to which we so often live. But we’re still left with the odd case of empathy being brandished as a necessary tool of profit maximization.
Even in Dholakia’s well-meaning article, it seems that empathy itself, or what we think it is or is for, is sort of the problem, a stand-in for real change. The author isn’t asking for an end to surveys, or the little invasions they constitute to our private lives, or to the ways in which finding more ways to make you buy more does nothing to address the overconsumption that’s doing a great job killing the planet. There’s nothing here that makes us consider the need for meaningful regulation of, say, healthcare delivery. What he seems to want instead is greater efficiency within that system, in a way that makes the targets of surveys feel better about the process, and in which the same intended end is achieved: gathering data that will lead to businesses earning more money, and convincing customers that they’re more than tools in that process. He wants surveys, in other words, that aren’t bad for business. In this instance, just as badly designed and conducted and responded-to surveys become meaningless, empathy, when used as a means toward this type of end, itself becomes essentially devoid of meaning.
It’s not that businesses shouldn’t be responsive to customer concerns or feedback; it’s just that the trivialization of a concept as complex and difficult to practice as empathy is itself offensive. Dholakia’s article seems to be saying that you tinker a bit with the surveys and the responses to them, and you can switch empathy on with a snap. Oppose this instrumentalization of empathy to what I guess I’ll call the organically developed network of respect and trust that Jacobs describes: a web of relationships that can’t emerge through the use of surveys, and that takes years, maybe, to develop, and to develop in concert with and within a community. Or take Jean Bethke Elshtain’s discussion of the need to do more than log opinions in politics, and we’re provided with more evidence of how important it is to keep in mind the work real empathy entails.
Even before Yelp and reader comments sections had become a thing, Elshtain was concerned about politicians’ attempts to connect with voters through “instant plebiscites via interactive television and telepolling.”7 The danger here, she says, is that such forms of feedback hardly allow for “a democratic polity sustained by debate and judgment,” and are in fact are even used by authoritarian powers for their own benefit. Whatever it is a government or politician wants to know or prove, the process of getting that type of feedback “can be registered ritualistically, so there is no need for debate with one’s fellow citizens on substantive questions,” and no fostering in said process that “sense of responsibility for one’s society” necessary to keep a democracy alive and functioning. Simply registering your choice among a list of options, or selecting a score on some assigned scale, “does not make a civic culture,” but is instead “a crude version of so-called preference theory in economics," according to which individuals are merely "preference maximizers," and "there is no such thing as a social good.”
It’s not necessarily that polls and plebiscites couldn’t be used as an initial way of wading into some very, very generalized feeling about a particular issue—but from the start, they’re not even as nuanced or informative as inane Twitter or Facebook debates, where people are at least in some sort of conversational connection with each other. To start and end with plebiscitary feedback as-is will at best probably provide you with incomplete information; will at worst, as even Dholakia points to, give citizens good reason to believe you don’t care and are out of touch. But good as they may be, polls do nothing to foster any meaningful form of empathy that would earn Jacobs’s and/or Elshtain’s support.8 They certainly wouldn’t satisfy Sherrilyn Ifill, who explicitly laid out in a recent article what that concept would look like in the political realm.9
Ifill asserts that “empathy is one of the strongest, most consequential tools in a democracy”—because it gets people out on the streets to protest, together, to take action in each other’s presence that bears witness to a “display of power, that burgeoning swell of solidarity.”10 Solidarity, too, is a concept that often gets tossed around far too easily, but Ifill wields her terms in calling for difficult, committed social (more than isolated individual) action: “This is not the time to give up empathy or solidarity, to stop voting or marching or organizing”—to do more, in other words, than sitting on your couch completing a survey.
Maybe I’m just making political mountains out of corporate molehills, or confusing categories, or bringing in serious questions where they don’t belong. Businesses are not democracies, after all, and selling a pair of sneakers shouldn’t involve the same considerations as governmental policy decisions. But to say that businesses aren’t or shouldn’t be concerned with what it means to live in a meaningful democracy is also going too far; it’s certainly going too far when we’re talking about insurance providers or other purveyors of services that have consequential effects on people’s lives, and that shouldn't be run with the overarching aim of increasing its profits.
At this point, I’m afraid I’ll have to exit this essay with sort of a whimper, throwing up my hands at the inevitability of my dentist and my post office cashier and the guy who trims my trees and my furnace tech begging me to leave a positive rating on one site or another. I’m not going to participate in their surveys, though, and if I do have cause to give anyone feedback, I’ll call or go and talk to someone. But there’s so much more to say about privacy and surveillance, not to mention respect and honesty and transparency, and, of course, empathy, and what it could possibly mean, especially when we move into the never clearly delimited realm of politics, where the story becomes much more fraught and urgent. The thinking, then, shall be continued, hopefully with some sort of useful results.
Subscribe to Off-Modern Onions!
You can subscribe as well via RSS feed.Image credit: WAKR/Summit Radio, Incorporated, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
1. Here are just two: Ron Miller, "I’m so over customer experience surveys,” TechCrunch, 2 August 2022, and Utpal Dholakia, "Why Customers Hate Participating in Surveys,” Psychology Today, 6 June 2021.↩
2. Why yes, I have received this request after having undergone said procedure.↩
3. In a wonderfully timed coincidence, Dirk von der Horst wrote this week over at Substack* about how “Empathy comes across as the one socially permitted feeling left in a culture that prioritizes dispassionate science as the ultimate arbiter of truth.” I’m guessing this is at least partially the case because our general understanding of what empathy is or should be is so watered down that, as von der Horst says, “Love, unlike empathy, involves actual risk. Love, unlike empathy, risks wounds. Empathy is a guarantee of staying within rational bounds of feeling. Love may break those bounds with unfortunate results.” His assertion about love is in line with Martin Luther King Jr.’s clarification, cited in Sherrilyn Ifill’s article below, that “love without power is sentimental and anemic,” and is deeply involved in the very risky business of bringing real justice into being. Or as Queen and David Bowie would have it—and this is in no way meant frivolously, “love dares you to care for / the people on the edge of the night / And love dares you to change our way of / Caring about ourselves.” David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, et al., “Under Pressure," released as a single in 1981 on EMI.
Something's weird with my coding, so here's a link to Dirk's site: https://dirkh.substack.com/p/god-is-love-not-empathy?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
↩
4. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). In spite of the fact that I know exactly where it should be on which shelf, I’ve now ransacked my home trying and failing to find my copy of the book—and have hence had to rely on an internet source for quotations from Jacobs’s work, even if they only capture the spirit of what she was discussing in Death and Life.↩
5. Jane Jacobs quoted in Harry Hobson, “Jane Jacobs and the importance of the seemingly trivial neighbourhood interactions," neighbourlylab, 28 June 2022.↩
6. Even the simple process of visiting a store may be under threat, given the use of facial recognition technologies. See, for example, Marc Robbins," Privacy concerns over facial recognition technologies at grocery stores," wfsb.com, 18 July 2023, and Adam Satariano and Kashmir Hill,“ Barred From Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition," The New York Times, 28 June 2023. The Times has at least a few articles up on this—but you have to get behind the paywall to read them.↩
7. All quotations in this paragraph are from Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 128–30. Elshtain cites Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign as helping to popularize and encourage the practices she describes.↩
8. Nor would the sort of intermediary realm of talk shows, as analyzed brilliantly back around the time Elshtain was writing by Richard M. Levine—who also reveals much about the way Bill Clinton often performed his politics in acknowledgement of a craving for empathy, and not just in his famous "I feel your pain" moment in a 1992 appearance in Rochester, NY. As he said about the talk show, it “leads to no genuine action;” as he demonstrated Clinton making use of a talk-show-ized political universe, “It isn’t important to tell the truth or be candid on television, only to appear to be truthful and candid, to give off the right visual signals.” See Levine’s “I Feel Your Pain, Mother Jones, July/August 1993.
Also, my coding's going screwy again, so if you want to see Clinton's Rochester appearance, head to C-SPAN: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5031955/clinton-feel-pain.
↩
9. Sherrilyn Ifill, “How America Ends and Begins Again,” The New York Review of Books, 21 December 2023: 58–60. ↩
10. All quotations in this paragraph are from Ifill, 60.↩