Chronically unable to do a survey
Dec 25, 2013, 3:03 am
#1
FlyerTalk Evangelist, Ambassador, British Airways Executive Club
Original Poster
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Somewhere between 0 and 13,000 metres high
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Chronically unable to do a survey
[Professional hat on] I spend much of my professional life not only organising surveys but being asked by people to explain to them how to do and how not to do surveys, as it so happens that half a dozen disciplines have cumulated vast insights over the past few decades and that one doesn't just improvise themselves a survey designer.
I hate to think of how much FB spend on the surveys they send me but those are some of the most grossly incompetent pieces of consulting rubbish I have ever seen and god knows that I have seen many. First of all, they ignore everything we know about question ordering, scaling, questions centring and more, but even to give a few very simple examples of very basic lack of thought going into that waste of time:
- Most of the questions are completely unclear
- I am asked in which of my three top FFPs I have the highest status but can only choose one of the three, not say that I have the same status in several or all of them.
- I am asked how many miles I have on my account but have my answers invalidated because it does not fit (and I don't think I am on a level noone would have). It seems that anything above 99,999 miles is probably not recognised!
- I am asked for the value I think 100 FB miles have but again my answer is rejected. clearly, what I think sounds too little for FB (and it wasn't a "joke" like 0.0000001 which I could have done, but simply they won't accept the decimals to the cent) so I had to round it to 0 to have it accepted.
Anyone doing a half decent job would spend weeks piloting their questionnaires which obviously those people do not. Even though it is probably not FB themselves who are doing it, it reflects extremely poorly on them as the utterly incompetent and amateurish and stingy frequent flyer programme that most of us know.
I hate to think of how much FB spend on the surveys they send me but those are some of the most grossly incompetent pieces of consulting rubbish I have ever seen and god knows that I have seen many. First of all, they ignore everything we know about question ordering, scaling, questions centring and more, but even to give a few very simple examples of very basic lack of thought going into that waste of time:
- Most of the questions are completely unclear
- I am asked in which of my three top FFPs I have the highest status but can only choose one of the three, not say that I have the same status in several or all of them.
- I am asked how many miles I have on my account but have my answers invalidated because it does not fit (and I don't think I am on a level noone would have). It seems that anything above 99,999 miles is probably not recognised!
- I am asked for the value I think 100 FB miles have but again my answer is rejected. clearly, what I think sounds too little for FB (and it wasn't a "joke" like 0.0000001 which I could have done, but simply they won't accept the decimals to the cent) so I had to round it to 0 to have it accepted.
Anyone doing a half decent job would spend weeks piloting their questionnaires which obviously those people do not. Even though it is probably not FB themselves who are doing it, it reflects extremely poorly on them as the utterly incompetent and amateurish and stingy frequent flyer programme that most of us know.
Dec 25, 2013, 6:22 am
#3
FlyerTalk Evangelist, Ambassador, British Airways Executive Club
Original Poster
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Somewhere between 0 and 13,000 metres high
Programs: AF/KL Life Plat, BA GGL+GfL, ALL Plat, Hilton Diam, Marriott Gold, blablablah, etc
Posts: 30,733
Hopefully they will be better at analysing answers than at asking questions. When they asked "what comes to mind when you think of Flying Blue", I answered "Ripoff" and "Highway robbery" to make sure that they have something that does not require any particular professional skill to understand! 
Dec 25, 2013, 6:59 am
#5
FlyerTalk Evangelist, Ambassador, British Airways Executive Club
Original Poster
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Somewhere between 0 and 13,000 metres high
Programs: AF/KL Life Plat, BA GGL+GfL, ALL Plat, Hilton Diam, Marriott Gold, blablablah, etc
Posts: 30,733
Dec 25, 2013, 7:48 am
#6
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Oct 2000
Posts: 14,352
Yeah, associative connotations like Madoff, Enron, AIG, Libor and Barclays would all be way beyond their comprehension.
Johan