Monday, April 10, 2006

#636 And Now an Unanswerable Question

Monday, April 10, 2006

I had to call the AOL technical help phone line the other day to solve a problem. I expected to be on hold for a while, and to get blah assistance. My earlier experiences with AOL chat help were so bad I accused the "helper" of being an automated keyword recognition program. He was very indignant, "I am too alive!"

Instead, this time I got right in, the guy knew exactly what my problem was, fixed it immediately, and stayed on the line until I tried it and was satisfied.

So today AOL asked me to take a satisfaction survey. Everything was fine, I rated everything as "Excellent", until I got to the following two questions (quoted as well as I can remember):

What was your expectation of AOL Customer Service before you called?
Excellent
Good
Average
Fair
Poor

I answered "Average", because I didn't expect much. The next question:

How would you rate AOL Customer Service on meeting your expectations?
Excellent
Good
Average
Fair
Poor

Now how the heck do you answer that? They were nowhere near my expectations, so do I answer "Poor"? If I had expected the service to be "Poor", and if it was in fact "Poor", exactly as expected, should I respond that they were "Excellent" on meeting my expectations? Having met my expectations exactly? Maybe I should have answered "Average", but that would imply that I usually expect average performance and usually get excellent performance.

Did anyone review or test these questions before they sent them out?

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