I’m a bit of a marketing geek - I freely admit it. In fact, my hiring policy has been based around an idea that a good friend of my wife shared with me a few years back. She believes that for a man to be attractive he has to have 10% geek: no more, no less. I’ve successfully applied that principle to building businesses from scratch and it’s a compelling mix.

But one manifestation of my ‘geek’ (frankly I probably knock the 10% ceiling from time to time) is responding to surveys. I guess it stems from wanting to see what marketers are up to and what they’re asking.

Of course, the cynical view is that surveys will (should) always tell you what you want to hear - and a big contributory factor sits in the way the questions are asked. The link is to a result from Google Book Search, btw. There are any number of illustrations of this point if you ‘conduct a google search‘ to support this further.

But the survey I looked at tonight was a classic case of forcing the answer you want. I was being asked about my view of some sponsored web content. Before I looked at the content, I had to visit the site in question.

During the survey, I was asked if I had visited, enjoyed and would be likely to revisit the content. I’d visited three of the eight content areas… but I was unable to continue with the survey unless I ticked a box that said I’d visited it. I therefore had to lie to proceed.

This is not an uncommon issue: there’s a tendency in surveys to insist on answers to questions, and it is simply a question of the survey authors not thinking through the options.

Research does, of course, have substantial value… but please don’t take it at face value. Sometimes people are less than scruplously honest… and it’s not always their fault.

Tags: geek, google, google book search, market research, survey

It’s a personal bugbear of mine: the emphasis on getting a good measurement versus the actual delivery of results. It manifests in many ways - I recall a conversation with a digital media sales guy who was determined to tell me that the best thing about the web was that you could measure everything. Never mind how WELL it worked, the measurement was the best part.

And yes, measurement has value (usually to help improve results), but there is a point at which the actual value of what you are doing gets lost.

This is very apparent in customer service situations.

My wife took her car to the local dealership for its annual service a few months back. The customer service was, at best, average… actually, we had cause to feel it was not even that good. But the Service Manager was determined we should, nevertheless, give them a 10/10 in the customer satisfaction survey we were about to be invited to complete. Anything less than that, he told us, and his operation would get a black mark.

We were then told several more times that a survey was coming up. Despite having nothing to do with the service, I was telephoned and asked what I thought of the service - and to make sure we’d give a good mark in the service. When I indicated dissatisfaction, I was pressed to put this aside for the forthcoming service and still give a good mark.

By the time the survey came around… well, I’m sure you can guess my mood.

All this came flooding back to me with a piece in the paper today about a man who, having been told (rudely, it seems) that he could not extend his overdraft with the Abbey, was pressed to give a good mark in the post-call survey. The results make painful reading.

In either case, had a fraction of the effort expended trying to persuade the customer to mark the service well gone into actually providing good service, everyone would have been much happier.

So I will take actual positive experience over survey results every time.

… and that is reflected in the way consumers prefer peer reviews to marketing spiel every time too.

Tags: abbey, customer satisfaction, mercedes, survey