The Customer Service Survey

Vocalabs' Blog

Survey or Suggestion Box?

Posted by Peter Leppik on September 27, 2010
in
A Survey A Suggestion Box
Uses a random scientific sampling process to select who participates Most anyone who wants to can participate
Designed to eliminate as many systematic biases as possible Used mainly by people with a complaint
Questions are carefully designed to yield data about specific issues Too general to systematically measure specific problems
A reasonably large fraction of selected participants complete the survey Very few people bother
Yields data which is reliable, actionable, and credible Yields data which is unreliable, not practical, and unconvincing
Used by a company for both strategic and tactical decision making Largely ignored

Part of the challenge in measuring the quality of customer service today is that there are so many suggestion boxes pretending to be surveys.