Having lived in the US and being Dutch, I know that it is partly a cultural thing. Dutch people are much more blatantly honest, while Americans definately love to sugar coat. How many ask "How are you doing?" but then proceed to ignore the answer?
That being said, we get a lot of feedback but I admit I as developer talk to too few customers to get a big picture. I'm sure I could get honest feedback from them however.
It's cultural, yes, but this particular example isn't necessarily emblematic. In American english, "How are you?" isn't a literal question, it's a conventional greeting. The answer is expected to be "Not bad" or "Fine" or "Well" -- not because of a desire to sugarcoat everything, but simply because it functions linguistically as a start-of-conversation marker or just a standalone greeting. People are thrown off when someone responds immediately with an honest, in-depth answer about how their life is. It's like pinging a server and getting back a process list. Unfortunately it happens to be that our implementation of certain conversation protocols is slightly different in mutually confusing ways :) <-- sugarcoating
Most languages have their own version of adjacent question/answer pairs that don't really function as literal questions. Searching for "have you eaten yet?" will pull up lots of interesting examples.
That being said, we get a lot of feedback but I admit I as developer talk to too few customers to get a big picture. I'm sure I could get honest feedback from them however.