While for most of us it's a rhetorical question, some can't help themselves. We understand it's wrong, maybe somewhat humiliating, we still do it. As people, as brands. And while on a personal level we are affecting one person, on a brand level we are affecting hundreds, thousands, if not millions of our customers.

Why is it so important to know how customers feel after every single transaction? Why do we we get from that data?

Well it is a source of confidence, knowledge & inspiration for those who collect it; for those who share, though, it's often a signal of insecurity, lack of confidence and of many other things that demonstrate weakness. It means that while trying to gain confidence, we are actually portraying the lack of it.

We still need that data though. We need it to take decisions, report and prove that we hit our KPIs. How do we get it?

First, let's look at the reasons that make us ask our customers to rate their experience after every single transaction.

Being surrounded with so many apps, you keep getting emails and push notifications a lot. I am asked about my experience each and every time I pay for my electricity bills, mobile phone bills, fines – you name it, even if it happened twice in the last minute, rest assured that it will be followed by a question if that transaction made me any happy.

The rule of thumb is that, well, it didn't. It never will. I just paid! Especially if I paid for something that is perceived as a commodity, a forced purchase or a subscription – water, electricity, phone bills or home broadband – it's not like you have just got a ticket to a transatlantic cruise or F1 Grand Prix weekend. You are paying for something you have already used, something you can't feel or get excited about. Should we really try to understand if the customer was happy with the fact that he had just got slightly poorer by spending cash on commodities? You know the answer.

Indeed, the majority of us are curious about measuring this specific interaction. Why? We hope that the customer will tell us if there is an issue with the service we provide. But do we really need them to do that? If we are trying to measure the performance of a digital gateway, we can relate to many responses the API is providing us with, the average time spent while paying, the number of payment options and dropout rates.

It's easy to make the customers to do your job, and when it comes to customers, why do we always tend to look around for shortcuts? But I invite everyone to be a little bit more creative about how to get this data without the customer being involved. Use technology to get that data. Create rules that will help you track behaviors and find significant discrepancies in expected vs. actual occurrences. Don't put your burden on the shoulders of your loyal customers.

Also an option. Won't work for subscription services though (measuring the experience of long-relationships requires strategy & planning), but if we aim to capture the experience our customer was exposed to during a one-off interaction we could surely ask this question.

Just make sure you have rules set up for recency and frequency, create events that will stop or trigger your NPS, CSAT or CES survey. Never send it out on every occasion to every customer, as your data will be worthless and your customers will drop out or will be willing to do so.

If we want to keep our relationships and make them better, we have to communicate values such as confidence and empathy, be more understanding. We shouldn't be gaining knowledge and data to feed our confidence at the expense of our customers. Because while trying to become "more understanding & empathetic" we commit an act of betrayal against those values. As we are neither empathetic, nor understanding when we bombard customers with experience evaluation surveys after every single transaction.