I Am Somewhat Satisfied with this Post
Today's Dining In section features an article about Kool-Aid Pickles. I've never heard of such a thing. I didn't even know they still made Kool-Aid. I'm sure my 9 year old self would love them but my old lady self is not so enthusiastic.

So, customer satisfaction surveys.

Really corporate world, you can extract valuable information from a series of questions with responses something like:

Totally Satisfied, Satisfied, Somewhat Satisfied, Unsatisfied, No Answer

(When they're doing it over the phone it's always fun to ask, what were the choices again?)

Toyota has a paper survey that's 4 pages of those questions. I started to fill it out once and after 10 questions wrote in, "How valuable is my time and energy?"

And they never ask you anything useful or anything where you could explain an actual problem.

>Were you satisfied with the way you were greeted?

Unless they throw rocks at me, why wouldn't I be satisfied? If they're super busy and I have to wait, maybe I'm annoyed but what are they supposed to do? Be less busy?

For my stupid body work on my car I received *two* form thank you notes from Kadels (body work shop) and two customer service surveys, one from Kadels and one from Farmers (insurance). Are you kidding me?

How about instead of wasting all these resources on follow up, make my repair cost less? The only thing I was unsatisfied with was the cost. I had three separate incidents that needed repair, two were covered by insurance, one not. Miraculously, the one I paid out of pocket they decided after a review I needed to pay an extra $40. Really, it was worth everyone's time and energy to squeeze another $40 out of me? That's what I get for not taking their stupid rental car. And for being honest. Next time all the scrapes on the car can be from a hit and run.

I've noticed that when I get a car work done at the dealership, if there is the slightest blip in the transaction, maybe I have to wait too long, or there's some disagreement about the repair, there's never a customer service follow up. But when all goes well, they're dying to know what I think.

About a month ago I fired up the Ann Taylor website on my lunch hour to look at some pants and it wouldn't let me look unless I upgraded some plugin. I think if you're going to use the Internet as a tool to sell your wares, you should cater to a wide range of technological capabilities. If I can't look at pants on your website because I need a plugin, I'm not going to download the plugin, I'm going to go look at pants somewhere else.

I sent their customer service a quick note with my error message and browser info and that basic sentiment and I got this moronic response that basically indicated I was too stupid to use my browser and suggested I get help from my Internet Service Provider or my Systems Administrator.

I decided it wasn't my job to teach Ms. Taylor about usability and that was that. The next day I find a customer service satisfaction follow up in my inbox. I ignored it. That afternoon, I received a follow up to my customer service follow up reminding me I could participate in their lame-brained survey. I think Ann needs a new consultant on her Internet strategy.