Marketing Profs put together an article about customer surveys and how they can be totally misleading. The crux of the argument is that surveys are fairly useless because people do not behave in predictable ways.

The article is worth a read, but they overstated their case a bit when they wrote:

"Customers are sensitive, emotional, and, let's face it, irrational beings. ... Shockingly, 95% of our brain activity centers on the irrational or subconscious, leaving a meager 5% busy trying to explain why we act or feel certain ways. And we do this not by tapping into our subconscious, but by making inferences based on our behavior. In essence, we make things up.

"So if we can't even tell ourselves the truth, why should we expect customers to provide truthful feedback on satisfaction?"

I don't actually buy into the idea that people are that irrational. People not behaving as we wish or expect them to does not make them irrational and unpredictable. What it really means is that we're not properly accounting for what motivates them (even if it is on a subconscious level).

In Made to Stick, the authors cite research that people behave as they expect other people in their self-identified group to behave. In the book they use the example that people will vote for candidates that do not necessarily support the voter's own self-interest.

I find this idea of social thinking persuasive. Based on what I've observed, this is the best model I've seen as it explains apparently irrational behavior.

While there tends to be a lot of emphasis on the individual (which is a good first approximation), looking only at the individual won't fully explain how people behave. By nature, humans are social creatures and we're stronger in groups than as lone individuals. It's hardly surprising, then, that social thinking influences human behavior.

This is one of the reasons that developing communities is potentially powerful. I am talking here about communities that foster a sense of interconnectedness between people, and communities in which the self-identity of the group is somehow wound up with the product. (I am not talking about a simple, flat community, e.g. an online forum.)

It also means that the community cannot be bogus and the product can't be shoddy. This has to be something people feel makes their lives richer and can serve as a positive connection between people.

Not an easy task, but potentially very powerful and positive. Certainly not achievable if, when people don't behave as expected, they are simply dismissed as irrational.