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You can totally trust anything pushed by a spokesthing called 'the Annoying Thing.' |
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*Censored to protect the guilty (me). |
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Yes, these are "legitimate" polls from my Facebook sidebar. |
1) They are self-selective.
Nobody has to take these surveys, and no specific criteria ensures that a wide, representative range of people will. It is random, but not in the way you want as a statistician. You want a random sample from across your entire spectrum, not just coincidentally-high numbers from the 'R' and 'G-BI' parts of ROY-G-BIV.
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In other words, never trust a fucking rainbow to do shit itself. |
2) They discriminate against all kinds of demographics.
You know who doesn't use a com-pu-tor much? Your great-grandmother Gladys. Try convincing her to - on her own, assuming she has a computer and Web access and any familiarity with "the Google" - go online and take this survey about a place she barely remembers visiting anyway. Or what about people without regular computer access? Scoff all you want, there are still plenty of citizens even in the Godblessed, good ol' US of A who don't have that, and they must use their coveted half-hour of Internet time at the public library to work around the porn-filters.
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While trying to hide a boner in a public environment. |
3) They disproportionately represent negative responses.
Quick: which are you more likely to do, compliment or bitch about a stranger? What if it was also relatively challenging and time-consuming to do so? And there was no particular reason to? Well, that is exactly what it's like taking these surveys. How awesome does your experience with a business need to be that you are going to take home the receipt and, within the allotted 3 days, go online, find the website, enter all of the codes and identifying info, then sit through a 12-page survey of repetitive, inane queries?
The food was excellent, I loved the ambiance, and then my server blew me. Keep up the good work! |
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Nope, wrong again! *Shake.* |
4) They are usually inadequate, poorly-worded, or redundant.
How many times when taking a survey, any survey, have you said to yourself, "Wow, it's really amazing how perfectly this set of predetermined responses accurately represents my precise thoughts and feelings on every subject, omitting no potential alternative?" If you are at all like me, you can count the number of times on one hand, at best. Or more likely your tongue. I will wager the tally is far larger in the, "Wait, what the fuck does this question even mean?" column. That's the bitch of language: it means something slightly different to each person, especially morons, which is who you are courting with these surveys for the most part. Add to this the fact that many of them essentially ask the same thing over and over.
When language becomes a barrier, you increase the risk of it skewing your numbers, because subjects either don't understand what they are being asked or grow tired of it and simply start clicking to get the shit over with. Or they just quit.
5) They do not account for repeated results.
There is nothing to stop the same customer from taking the survey over and over again. In fact, given the relentless ever-mounting pressure most companies put on their employees to garner quantifiable results, they are actually demanding repeat respondents. Not only does this become difficult if you work somewhere that the same people regularly visit ("Can you please go online and rave about me for the sixth time this month, ma'am? Thanks!"), it wholly undermines the validity of the poll numbers. Yes, you can track when people repeatedly take the damn thing, but are you really going to write filtering algorithms to account for them differently? My bet is no. There is a reason you aren't allowed to vote as many times as you want in an election.
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Because Gary Busey would go to the polls enough times to elect himself president, that's why, and you damned well know it. |
6) They bribe you to take them.
Hardly a one of these surveys fails to promise the chance of some reward for taking it. Otherwise, seriously, why would you bother? Are you inbred? But enticing respondents with free food or prizes or cash or handjobs automatically means these people are probably not there first and foremost to supply honest, thoughtful opinions. They want the handjobs. Who doesn't?
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Ok, fine, finger-bangs for you. |
While these flaws may not all apply to each feedback survey, it only takes a few to undermine their integrity and thus usefulness. That is the bitch about statistics. The geniuses who came up these things may opine that somehow this massive mishmash of biases somehow average out to an accurate profile, with each oversight or blunder negating another, but the truth is fairly apparent: as "experts" in the field of schilling shit, they have figured out the easiest people to exploit are the ones who ask you to help them exploit their own customers. So, they tout the superlative importance of constant user-feedback in the form of verified poll data, cite the explosive growth of social media awareness, and then warn the corporation contracting them that all of this is absolutely necessary to business success, despite the fact no business relied on this crap in the history of business prior to approximately 4 years ago.
So what? you might be inclined to think. What does it matter if the surveys suck worse at their jobs than George W. Bush? Well, it really wouldn't, except that companies are now putting huge emphasis on them. As in, these are being considered key indicators of business performance. Trust me, I work for a franchise where this is the case. And a mere lack of negative responses doesn't help. Hell, even above-average marks do not count for us. Only receiving the best possible scores constitutes a win in our column, which is like saying your sports team only moves up in the league standings if they beat the competition by a massive margin every game.
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Sorry, Kobe, that's just not good enough. Can't you score more points? |
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Sure, the restaurant may look busy, but how can you truly know it's successful if they're not filling out surveys? |
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