Thursday, September 11, 2014

How to do surveys - always in your favour :)

Today I got an invite/pop-up from a local TELCO. As I am always keen to provide feedback to improve the situation, I tried to spend couple of min to give my honest feedback.

But when I saw this page (screen shot below) I end up leaving the page. They knew that the "survey organizer" which in this case the website admin or outsourced company (i guess) need to get good marks.

Good & may be Hard way - listen to the customers, users and update.
Easy & simple way - Skew the survey results in their favour and claim that they are doing a great job.

So the survey asks questions but gives options to choose -
Poor - Average - Above Average - Good - Excellent
(-1)        (0)                    (+1)              (+2)       (+3)

We normally see,
Poor - Below Average-Average-Above Average - Excellent/Good
(-2)        (1-)                    (0)              (+1)       (+2)


So you see how it end up.. They remove the far negative and the end score would be way better than the reality. No wonder these days social scientists, data scientist jobs are in demand. :)