PSA: You can’t opt out of the customer surveys Netflix is running in its TV app, but you can skip

While preparing to do a little binge-watching over the holidays, something odd popped up on my TV’s screen upon launching the Netflix app on my Roku: a consumer survey. Well, that’s new, I thought to myself, while quickly navigating to the “Skip” button.

Fortunately, skipping the survey was easy and getting back to the app was fast. Still, it was surprising to see Netflix going the route of soliciting direct customer feedback right on the TV screen – especially so soon after Netflix got flack for an ill-advised tweet reminding customers how closely it was tracking their viewing behavior.

The survey itself was only one question – and a rather vague one at that.

“How much do you agree: Netflix provides exactly what I’m looking for,” the survey asked, without the proper punctuation.

You could select one of five buttons in between “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” as a response. Or, as I did, you can bypass the survey altogether.

Oh look. Netflix does on-screen surveys now. pic.twitter.com/0ysNk3OdCf — Sarah Perez (@sarahintampa) December 23, 2017

I wasn’t familiar with Netflix running surveys directly on the television like this, and it seems I wasn’t alone. I also couldn’t find any news coverage of in-app TV surveys performed by Netflix, either, which led me to believe this was a new initiative on the streaming service’s part.

As it turns out, I was wrong. But since the topic was fairly hard to Google, consider this your PSA.

According to Netflix, on-screen surveys have been running across its TV platforms since this May. The current survey is actually running on all major devices worldwide, but other platforms’ apps have hosted these survey questions for even longer than TVs.

While some surveys help companies figure out where to focus their efforts or get a better feel for their user demographics, Netflix says its goal with its in-app surveys is to “gauge customer satisfaction with Netflix.”

Do you like us? Really?, the company that just crushed its own expectations for subscriber growth with 5.3 million new customers wants to know.

The question I saw isn’t the only one being asked at present, and these questions may change in the future, too, we understand.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an opt-out mechanism, if you don’t want customer surveys to show up on your TV. According to Netflix’s help documentation about customer surveys, users can unsubscribe from email surveys from the Communication Settings page, but there’s nothing mentioned about turning off the on-screen TV surveys.

But Netflix does seem to be aware that taking over its streaming app to pester people with questions is not an ideal experience. The company notes these in-app surveys are infrequent, with only one or two a year at max being shown to each subscriber. They’re all skippable as well, whether you’re on the TV or not.