the ultimate online exercise system!

I was recently speaking with someone in a call centre about renewing our subscription to a weekly marketing journal. I was a little dismayed, because I had resubmitted our subscription three times previously – once by their web-enabled procedure, once using their pre-printed form, and once by fax. Apparently none of these methods had worked, so ‘phoning seemed to be the next route to explore.

I was greeted by a very pleasant woman whose job was to “guide me through the process”. Having declined my offer of our existing subscription number (because apparently they “don’t have access to this information”), she started on the laborious task of “ticking the boxes” (that’s “checking the boxes” for American readers). Very quickly it became apparent that as an organisation we didn’t “fit” their questionnaire. While the pre-printed form I had filled in made some allowance for consultancies – (there was an “Other” option and an “Other Services” option, with a little bit of room to expand on the nature of the “other”!) – no such option presented itself to the poor woman at the call centre. I suggested that maybe we should leave these fields blank, but apparently this was not acceptable: a box had to be “ticked” for the application to progress. So our application has now been processed, albeit with some erroneous data, and the data gatherer at least is happy.

It occurred to me that maybe many of the difficulties we find ourselves in today – economically speaking – could be laid at the door of the “tick box” culture we appear to live in. How many times have we been pressed to answer questions using a simple 1 to 5 ranking schema, where 1 is typically described as “Very (good/lovely/desirable etc.) and 5 is described as “Not at all (good/lovely/desirable etc.)”, when really what we want to do is give a truthful answer that is thought out and qualified?

How many times have we wanted to leave a field blank? But no, no – the quantitative fairies will not survive unless we tick a box. The trouble is, I don’t believe in (quantitative) fairies! Sadly, repeating this over and over again doesn’t automatically cause them to expire. In fact, they appear to be proliferating…

In short, the qualitative measure of what we do, how we perform, what our clients really think of our services, has been pushed to one side in favour of the quantitative approach. An approach that does, of course, provide statistics, those pseudo-scientific numbers that provide a pseudo-scientific proof that what is done is somehow “correct” or “right”, or can be “verified” or “validated”.

Let’s be clear: shoe-horning organisations into boxes does not generate reliable statistics!

The dreaded market survey questionnaire

Nowhere is the downside of this quantitative approach more clearly demonstrated than by those unfortunate market survey characters who ‘phone you up asking for information (in neat, box-tickable form, of course) about your company’s experiences or intentions in various sectors (banks, for some reason, have recently instigated a plethora of these ridiculous surveys – possibly in the hope of persuading people that they actually care a fig about what their customers think).

Often those asking the questions don’t even get hold of the right person to ask the questions of! I can think of a number of instances where junior staff have been asked to answer questions such as “What is your projected marketing spend over the next 2 to 3 years?” (followed by the inevitable range of budget options, of course). What’s more worrying is that junior staff often feel justified in answering these questions (even if the answer is incorrect) because (a) they don’t take this kind of question seriously, (b) they want to keep the caller off the boss’s back.

We – like, I suspect, most other businesses – have long had a policy of not replying to these unsolicited telephone surveys. But still, we’d like to help – especially when it’s banks that are showing signs of attempting to analyse their customers’ needs. However, requests to send the questionnaires by post or by e-mail so we can make a considered response are always spurned (often with considerable embarrassment).

So I have to conclude that simply gathering any information at all – regardless of how inaccurate it is – is the top priority. If we assume that call centres are paid by the number of completed questionnaires they produce, this would make some sense. But… what decisions are being made based on these flawed sets of questionnaire data?

The purveyors of these surveys will cry: “See? Checks and audits are in place!”! But come on – checks and audits were supposed to be in place at our financial institutions, and look what’s happened there. I think they were just ticking the boxes too! No, we are now firmly embedded in a “tick box culture” where the tick is more important than the answer itself…