My garbage disposal service sends me a survey once or twice a year asking if I would recommend them to my friends.
Where I live, garbage disposal is a county contract. You get get whatever company your county has engaged. Do they think people would to move to another county for better garbage disposal?
The endless misapplications of net promotor score are hilarious. My ISP does the same thing despite being the only one available.
The purpose of the tool is to infer customer loyalty. What's the point of that in a captive market? I suppose whatever 3rd party is facilitating the survey gets paid and that's something.
I always answer no to these type of situations, under the slight hope that maybe enough people will say "no" that it forces the county or city to get bids for the contract and investigate why people don't like the service, and try to do better.
Very occasionally these types of arrangements end up with an enthusiastically high performing company that does the right thing, but usually it's dumpster fires all the way down.
Has anyone in the history of mankind ever clicked "yes" to a website enabling desktop notifications? I feel like browsers should just adopt an "automatically say no to this bs" setting.
Maybe I'm odd, but even for stuff I use like gmail, desktop notifications have always been a hard no for me. But those examples at least make sense. It's absolutely baffling to me that anyone would allow it for something like CNN, or basically 99% of websites.
The other day, NewRelic insisted on full screen pop up dialogs prompting me for some form of feedback for I'm not even sure what.
Multiple times within a few minutes
During a damn incident I was trying to deal with
I left critical feedback. I wish someone would see it and feel ashamed, but it is rather clear that there haven't been decision makers in our industry capable of shame in many years.
It would be really funny if it wasn't a microcosm of the problems of our industry.
It's very clear they didn't even take a moment to think through "Why do users access our tool, under what circumstance, and how does our tool treat them in that situation", where it would have been pretty clear that "interrupt and block access to the user until they provide feedback" is not a good UX for an engineer trying to do literally anything.
Depending on whether it's a review of the item or the seller, that sounds like a good reason to rate it as one star, "item did not arrive". They did ask for that…
Did you know there's a new Gantt chart? Did you know there's a new Gantt chart? Did you know there's a new Gantt chart? Did you know there's a new Gantt chart? Did you know there's a new Gantt chart? Did you know there's a new Gantt chart? Did you know there's a new Gantt chart? -Wrike
The problem is that in any kind of customer facing scenario this feedback maps to a KPI that, often, an individual employee's or team's performance is assessed on. That KPI might impact pay reviews, bonuses, promotions, or even ongoing employment at the extreme.
Which sucks.
It's to the point where, when we broke down in a live lane on a dual carriageway the other day (flat tyre - actually shredded a run flat, newer car so no spare, all lay-bys closed so nowhere to pull off road and couldn't make it to next exit), the police came out and cordoned off the lane and then the AA guy who came and rescued us asked if we could write him a review when the feedback request came through.
Of course, on this occasion I did write him an absolutely glowing review (which he very much deserved, and which I was more than happy to do), because this was an incredibly dangerous situation - potentially life or death. I also sent a thank you to the local police force that helped us out.
But that's the point: it was life or death. It really mattered. So of course I wanted to say thank you, and the feedback mechanism provided a decent way to do that.
But most of these feedback requests are for things that don't matter that much, if at all, and are no better than spam, because of course everybody asks for it for every little interaction nowadays... and it's just endlessly tiresome.
So, yes: please stop.
(Btw, as someone who worked in market research for 7 years I can tell you that CX reviews skew towards the extremes - either very positive or very negative - and that you're much more likely to get a review if someone has a bad experience than if they have a good one. As a result, whilst these reviews can be good for qualitatively highlighting specific problems that might need to be solved, deriving any kind of aggregate score from them and expecting that to be representative of the average customer's experience is a fool's errand. Please don't do it. [Aside: I know, I know - this will stop no-one but I'd feel remiss if I didn't point it out, especially on this site where a lot of you will - I hope - get the point and apply it in your own businesses.])
It's rather as if a passive inbox with no notifications and where deleting implies lower prioritization of similar messages would be quite handy. Everything in that is Email except email has no concept of "hot".
The opposite: it's mandated that you not do data collection and tracking for reasons except those essential for the company to provide the product or service, absent informed consent. (And this is purely for tracking: cookies used for maintaining preferences or other state are fine.)
The banners are a fig leaf for behavior that violates the spirit of the GDPR, creating an aggravation where the simplest way to dismiss them is by agreeing.
Any site that doesn't offer a button to reject the tracking (with no more stops than angreeing) and still function as expected without the tracking, is in violation of the law.
Only if you use cookies; I think not everyone will need to use cookies. I think if you use cookies to login, then only the login form should hopefully need to mention the cookies. (However, there are better ways to do user authentication, such as basic HTTP auth or X.509 auth; neither of which requires cookies.)
The banner is required every time there is processing of personal data where consent of required, whether that processing happened thanks to cookies or thanks to any other technical means (1px gifs, JavaScript fingerprinting, etc)
Most websites do not need to process personal data (typically for analytics reasons); it's perfectly fine to run without that and only use personal data for transactional reasons, which AIUI doesn't require that sort of consent.
You don't need a cookie consent banner for strictly necessary cookies, such as those used for user authentication. You don't see any cookie banners on HN for example. Cookie banners are only needed for sites that track their users.
Stop asking me about accepting cookies.
Stop asking me to subscribe to your email list
Stop asking me to review my last purchase.
Stop telling me I need to subscribe to view this content.
Stop asking for my phone number
Stop asking for my income
If I want to do or tell you any of these things I will initiate that myself.