Revealing surveys

I love surveys.

I love peeling back the layers.

I enjoy revealing the motivation behind them.

It’s a thrill to reveal the personal psychological profile of the person who set the questionnaire.

I fill some surveys in for pleasure. I fill others in for cash.

On a professional level I design questionnaires.

I undertake data-capture exercises; from group workshops to intense 1-2-1 sessions.

I can sniff out a good survey from the first question.

And a bad one.

You may remember that we’ve been having BT Broadband issues?

Since 25th May?

The problem has recently been fixed.

Yeah, I know.

Six months.

Woo-hoo!

Anyway, as part of the fault-closing action, BT sends out a closing questionnaire.

You wondered where I was going with this, didn’t you?

Here’s a look at the questions they ask (click each image for the big picture):

This is a nice gentle question that clearly says it’s about the last person who dealt with me.. It’s not about how BT as an organisation dealt with the problem. It’s just about the last guy I spoke with.

This is another dolly-question. We’re still, essentially, talking about the last person I spoke with. But, as you can see, I’ve been straight about his ability to fix the problem.

The correct answer to this would, technically, not be the one I gave. But if I said that BT had fully dealt with the problem, I would have been taken somewhere I didn’t want to go. And besides, I want to flag something up…

It’s this. Six months of problems. Six months of sudden outages, speed losses, dropped connections. Six months of still paying the full bill!

This is one of the most stupid questions I’ve ever encountered on an internet survey. They mailed me a link. I clicked on the link. They must, surely, be able to connect the link I clicked on, to my details? But no, I’m being asked for my contact information. Bonkers.

Six months of problems and you think I’m going to recommend BT to *anyone*?

Telling it like it is again. The last guy I dealt with was a nice person. But it wasn’t within his domain to fix the problem.

How did BT handle things? Maybe I’m being a little generous here by responding with ‘Very dissatisfied’?

How many times did I get in touch with BT about this? And the radio button only goes up to ‘Ten times or more’? Hahahahaha!

Extremely dissatisfied at the length of time taken to fix the problem. That’s fair, yeah?

And this is fair too.

As is this.

Sigh.

But here’s a thing – and this is extremely revealing.

Not once does this questionnaire seek to differentiate the service levels that were delivered by BTs offshore call-centre, or the Tech Support people who I moved on to having dealings with in the last few months.

In fact, the questionnaire pointedly ignores even the *possibility* that the different arms of BT might deliver different qualities of customer service.

Let me put it this way.

If you were a senior manager in a large corporation which delivered customer service through more than one part of the organisation, you’d want to know how they compared.

Wouldn’t you?

off the record…
I do feel that had it not been for the intervention of a friend, that I would still be languishing at the hands of BTs offshore call-centre, no nearer problem resolution than I was six months ago on day one. This person works for BT and, through his internal actions, we were elevated to a technical support function in the UK. I feel I owe him a substantial debt of gratitude. He knows who he is. Thanks.