The Customer Service Survey
Clean Lists
Mon - July 16, 2007 02:42 PM in
Everyone recognizes that a key to getting good survey results is knowing who to survey.
Unfortunately, one of the challenges is often finding the right people. I was reminded of this today when I got a survey in the mail from a state government agency which really doesn't apply to us.
Apparently, this government agency wants to survey a particular type of company (which VocaLabs is not). About a year ago, they sent three people at VocaLabs e-mail invitations to participate, which we ignored since the survey doesn't apply to us.
A few months later, we got another set of e-mails, which we ignored again.
A few months later, we got a third set of e-mails, except that one of the recipients had since left VocaLabs, so the message was not only misdirected to the wrong company, but to the wrong person as well.
Then today, we got two copies of this same survey via postal mail, sent to our old address (which we vacated over six months ago), one of which was mailed to someone who left VocaLabs over two years ago.
And the survey still doesn't apply to us.
This state agency is probably wondering why they're not getting a good response to their survey, and you can't fault them for not being persistent enough (personally, I would have given up after much less than a year). I'm guessing that they bought the mailing list from a commercial list broker, but the list they got was wildly inflated with irrelevant names.
Fortunately for VocaLabs, it's usually pretty easy to figure out who to survey in a call center environment: the customers who just called you. In market research, as this state agency has discovered, it can be very difficult to get a clean list of relevant people to survey.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Apparently, this government agency wants to survey a particular type of company (which VocaLabs is not). About a year ago, they sent three people at VocaLabs e-mail invitations to participate, which we ignored since the survey doesn't apply to us.
A few months later, we got another set of e-mails, which we ignored again.
A few months later, we got a third set of e-mails, except that one of the recipients had since left VocaLabs, so the message was not only misdirected to the wrong company, but to the wrong person as well.
Then today, we got two copies of this same survey via postal mail, sent to our old address (which we vacated over six months ago), one of which was mailed to someone who left VocaLabs over two years ago.
And the survey still doesn't apply to us.
This state agency is probably wondering why they're not getting a good response to their survey, and you can't fault them for not being persistent enough (personally, I would have given up after much less than a year). I'm guessing that they bought the mailing list from a commercial list broker, but the list they got was wildly inflated with irrelevant names.
Fortunately for VocaLabs, it's usually pretty easy to figure out who to survey in a call center environment: the customers who just called you. In market research, as this state agency has discovered, it can be very difficult to get a clean list of relevant people to survey.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 02:42 PM | | | | |