How Gap Fails with Their Customer Satisfaction Survey
Any business that has customers should be concerned with their customers satisfaction. At VerticalResponse, we regularly survey our active customers with a simple Net Promoter Survey that asks the ultimate question, “How likely are you to recommend VerticalResponse to a friend or colleague?”
Our customers then rate us:
- 0 – 6 “detractors”, people that wouldn’t recommend us.
- 7 & 8 “passives”, people that think we’re all right, but not great.
- 9 & 10 “promoters”, people that tell all their friends about us.
From time-to-time, to encourage participation, we run an incentive for any customers that take the survey to be entered to get 100,000 free email credits. Anyone can win – regardless of the score they give us.
So, on a recent shopping trip to Gap, I received my sales receipt and was a bit surprised when I read it and discovered they were flat out asking customers to give them a “10” in exchange for 20% off.
Wowza, pretty presumptuous, eh? I think I’d rather Gap keep it real. I really like how they say, “we’re striving to make your experience a fun and easy one every time you shop.” But they lost me at, “give us a score of 10, and get 20% off.”
I think they would be better off extending the 20% discount to anyone that participates and get some real, actionable feedback from their customers. We often learn the most from customers that give us low scores, or those in the middle who are struggling with something. This type of information has helped us grow our business and better meet our customers’ needs.
So come on Gap, listen to all your customers and you might just learn something.
What do you think?
© 2011 – 2018, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.
Very telling, though I suspect that “S” was right on in saying that an individual store took a bit too much initiative.
If I had to guess, there is internal pressure at GAP to receive a great score. A store manager’s bonus might be tied to scores or perhaps the stores with the lowest scores are somehow sanctioned. Whatever it is, getting a great score has become more important than delivering great service.
Yep, this sounds like a single store implimented way to fool corperate into thinking they are rock stars. Makes one wonder if corperate was providing incentive for higher scores,.. like a bonus. I would have to assume this would be trouble for management were corperate to become aware. It entirely defeats the purpose of the information gathering in the first place.
Sorry S. I have to agree with Kim on this one. Since most of your brand recognition IS with your stores, it reflects on the entire brand. We don’t segregate Corporate from the Stores in consumer-land.
I work for gap and I can tell you that isn’t standard practice or something that company encourages, that piece of paper was made by the the actual store and not the company. The receipt it is attached to is the actual company provided format and we truly do use those surveys as a tool to improve our customer service, in this case it was a store trying to increase their score not the company itself.
Thank you Kim for sharing this. Talk about a bankrupt brand! I’m telling everyone about this referencing your post tomorrow. You can’t make this stuff up! – Good spotting!
It’s basically a useless survey.
This is incredible. What kind of customer survey is that? There is nothing like genuine support and love from customers. 20% off is nice, but asking to give the highest score to receive it is plain dishonest.
I think this sort of tactic should be illegal. The results will be completely skewed. How can the Gap gain any value from this so-called “survey,” much less publicize any of the survey results?
WOW! So bold. I would love to see what the conversions are and compare to a survey that isn’t buying recommendations. I totally 100% agree with you about not getting authentic feedback from customers when you are incentivizing them. Great post, Kim!