You call your bank, your insurance company, your internet provider, and the first voice you hear doesn't ask how you're doing.
It asks, in a tone of relentless cheerfulness, whether you'd like to complete "una encuesta." A survey, in Spanish, offered to you, an English speaker, by a company that has apparently decided language is now a choose-your-own-adventure.
It happens in the follow-up text message. "¿Cómo calificaría su experiencia?" Irate, Karen.
The companies deploying these prompts are not Spanish-language-first businesses.
Their hold music is a loop of smooth jazz and mild despair, also in English.
Yet somewhere between the chatbot and the billing department, someone decided the survey should arrive in another tongue, like a surprise quiz with no extra credit.
Sociologists have a term for gestures like this: performative inclusion.
It simply sprinkles a few Spanish words over a process that remains, in every meaningful way, unchanged.
But now the misery is bilingual, which someone in a conference room surely called a win.
Older Americans, immigrants from a dozen other countries, anyone who took French in high school—all of them stare at the screen wondering if they misread it.
Some press one and end up enrolled in a rewards program they never wanted.
A survey is supposed to measure customer satisfaction.
When a company cannot fix its hold times, its billing errors, or its broken promises, it turns to symbols.
These are the decorative touches of an institution that has stopped believing it can actually serve people, so it settles for signaling virtue instead.
The customer is not a person to be helped.
The customer is an audience to be managed.
And so we arrive at the modern American ritual: you spend forty minutes fighting an automated system, finally reach a human, resolve nothing, and then receive a text in Spanish asking how likely you are to recommend this experience to a friend.
None of this means Spanish is the problem.
Spanish is a beautiful language spoken by millions of Americans, and serving them well would be a genuine good.
The problem is the hollow gesture—the appearance of care without the substance.
A company that truly respected Spanish-speaking customers would staff bilingual support lines, not just decorate its exit surveys.
What we're watching is a small symptom of a larger drift: institutions that speak in every language except the plain one.
Final Thoughts
The one that says, "We're sorry, we'll fix it." Until that sentence returns, no survey—in any tongue—will tell the truth about what customers actually think.