I just dropped out of a Cisco customer satisfaction survey, after realizing the six pages I already filled out represent only 20% of the entire survey. I don’t know why they think they can make such unreasonable demands on people’s time.

Like most clueless surveys, they feature multiple inane questions where you are supposed to answer vague and irrelevant questions several times on a scale of 1 to 5. There are open text fields for feedback, but the likelihood of actual humans reading them is so low, it just isn’t worth my time to fill them out.

The ideal survey should have only three fields:

1. one to say whether you are satisfied or not (and this is a binary field, not on a scale of 1 to 5 or whatever).
2. a free-form text field for feedback. The company asking for the survey should commit to having an actual human read each feedback, and be empowered to take action. If it isn’t worth having a human read it, it’s not worth my filling it. Outsourcing a survey to SurveyMonkey or one of the myriad automated surveying firms just demonstrates that you are not really serious about feedback.
3. an optional field for an email address so you can ask follow-up questions.