Dawn Huczek, Creative Commons Attribution

“How did we do?”

The question might come from your doctor or dentist, your bank, credit card company, and any other organization you do business with.  They all want your feedback.  Sometimes the request is to click on a series of stars, five being the highest ranking. Other times it’s “only a two-minute form to help us improve customer satisfaction.”

I received the latter last week after spending eight months writing letters to ask a credit card company for a card, the one they didn’t send when an earlier one expired. I wrote to them, because by the time I got around to following up on the problem, a simple call to a credit card robot would have been very complicated. After several letters, the company understood part of the problem, so I felt more confident calling.  I asked for a Live Agent, and was told by a representative of the living dead that I didn’t need to talk to a live being, because it could do the job of a human. Eventually, I successfully babbled my way to help. And wonder of wonders, I received the help I wanted from the Live Agent. A week later, I received the credit card that had been denied me for nearly a year.

And now the company wanted to know how they did. Where to begin? How to explain in a form requiring only two minutes of my time that I had used at least two hours to achieve this satisfaction. I deleted the request.

And then there are the long surveys that ask the most personal questions on the topic, “How are you doing?”  Last winter, I received a multi-page booklet of questions from Nielsen ratings and one dollar bill to answer them.  The recycling bin got the tome and I got the dollar. A few weeks later another copy of the booklet and another dollar arrived, resulting in the same outcome as the first.

I have two stories about recent surveys my husband and I received.  First, a friend from out of town, called me last week using Messenger. She’s a blogger and when we lived in the same city we met weekly for coffee and encouraged each other in our efforts.  She worked in public relations, as did I, before retirement. We had a short conversation about the topic of “How are we doing?” surveys and how our former employers should have conducted a few, and then moved on to other subjects.  When the call ended – I’m not making this up – six stars appeared on my screen asking me to click and evaluate the experience. To rate a personal phone call???

In the second case, my husband bought wild bird seed and ant killer at a local hardware/building supplies store. He received requests to rate both products. Thus far, the ants have been silent, and there is only one answer from the birds: cheep, cheep, cheep.