We’d like you to take a brief survey

Our weekly net-promoter-score dashboard is hungry for fresh opinions

You’ve been identified as a customer willing to take a survey. Would you be willing to take a brief survey? We just want to know how we’re doing.

Our survey will only take a few moments of your time. Unless we wrote a really long one, then we’ll ask you dozens of questions and give you a progress bar that shows how many more pages of survey questions you have to fill out.

Your opinion is truly important to us. We can’t average out our scores and show trends each week unless we have thousands upon thousands of anonymous answers, so we will take the numbers you give us and throw them on the pile. Eventually it will form a trend line on a dashboard. If you’re lucky, someone will look at it.

Today it’s only a one-question survey. We want to know how we’re doing. You can choose any number from zero to ten — unless you give us a low score.

If you pick a number that’s less than perfect happiness, we won’t accept your survey without an explanation. You can fill out a text box explaining why your opinion is different from all the other bright shining people who use our software. One hundred characters or less.

Our dashboard shows the average of numbers. It doesn’t show your text, how could it? Your text is an anecdote. Net-promoter-score reports are data.

We want to know “how we’re doing.” We’re busy people. We are doing all the time. We don’t have time to write specific survey questions about this version of our software.

Our questions have to be the same each week. If we change the questions then we can’t plot them in a time series graph. We don’t want surveys to be relevant, we want them consistent.

Our sales team values your opinion

Our sales team will hand you a survey when you’re done purchasing our product. We’ll ask you to rate the product. We’ll ask you to rate the salesperson. We’ll ask you to rate the delivery experience.

If you forget to fill out the survey right after the purchase, we’ll send you a reminder email.

We really want your review score. Our sales team expects perfect review scores. We’ll give you a handy flyer that explains that we only accept perfection.

If your review scores come back less than perfect, we’ll reach out to you to explain why it should have been perfect. Your salesperson knows what score you gave. They will helpfully try to correct you.

Our expectation is that we always exceed your expectations. We read somewhere that expectations exist to be exceeded, so all of our scores have to reflect that.

Your salesperson’s job depends on exceeding your expectations. If you give them anything other than a perfect score they will be fired. So just be honest.

Have you used this feature?

Our IT department wants to know if you’ve used our website. We’ll ask you whether you’ve used each part of our website. You’ll have to answer yes or no.

If you answer yes, we’ll ask you how much you like it. On a scale of one to ten. If you don’t like anything, we’ll ask you to fill out an “Other” box.

We just added a new feature that isn’t popular yet. But we need 100 responses about it each week for our sentiment survey. So our algorithm will push the survey onto every user who touches the new feature until our numbers become valid.

We want to know if your visit to our website was better or worse than you expected. Everyone who visits our website must have expectations, otherwise, how could we exceed them?

We really want ideas for how our website can be better. We’ll ask you to rank each feature on our website from most-liked to least-liked. We want to know if our about-us page is better than our privacy policy page.

Our customers value our website so much, they don’t mind filling out a long survey. We only care about opinions from customers who fill out the whole thing. If a customer got frustrated halfway through and closed the window, those survey numbers probably wouldn’t be correct anyway.

You can’t cancel without telling us why

You want to cancel our service? We’re sorry to see you go. We’ll miss you. You were a valued customer.

But, well, we need to know why. We can’t process your cancellation request without you filling out a survey. Please choose the reason you cancelled from the list above.

If you choose a reason we understand, wow, have we got news for you! We actually solved that problem. Were you aware that we solved it? Now you don’t need to cancel anymore! Please choose a different reason.

Wait, you chose “other” as the reason? We don’t like problems we don’t understand. Please fill out this text box explaining the reason why you want to cancel. A helpful customer service person will reach out to you and let you know if your reason is valid; we wouldn’t want to let you cancel until you have spoken to them.

Your opinion is truly important to us

We really value your opinion. Without your opinion score, we wouldn’t be able to know which of our teams are doing a good job.

We make lots of software! Or websites. Or widgets. Our executives are busy people. They can’t be bothered to know what every team in the company does and whether it’s any good.

So maybe, if we get enough responses, we can average the numbers out and produce a nice chart. We don’t need it to be perfect, we just need to show that the numbers were bad in the past and they got better after we launched our favorite new feature.

We value you as an individual! That’s why we lump your opinion together with a thousand other users and grind you into a single measurement.

Our number this week was 7.6. That’s better than last week, but not as good as next week. Our team gets a pizza party if we reach 8.0.

Thank you for visiting. We’ll be sure to ask you again next week so we can see how we improved.

The author once found a stack of paper survey forms on a disused table at a cafeteria in college. He took the entire stack and asked his friends to help fill them out. The college added a Taco Bell franchise the next month.