Surveys

As a small busi­ness own­er, I often get people call­ing up with some sur­vey or anoth­er. They want to know wheth­er my busi­ness is grow­ing, wheth­er I’ll be hir­ing more people this year, and what soft­ware and ser­vices I sell. If these sur­veys are the basis of the eco­nom­ic polls pre­dict­ing what’s hap­pen­ing this year, I’d advise the world to dis­count most of the answers. The ques­tions sounds like they were writ­ten pre­sup­pos­ing par­tic­u­lar answers; since the ques­tions often don’t make sense the answers won’t either.

As an example, the loc­al MBE had a sur­vey about ship­ping, which included the ques­tion “How much extra would you pay for faster ship­ping?” to which I answered “depends on how import­ant it is that it get there faster”. This was not con­sidered a reas­on­able answer; I was meant to put a dol­lar fig­ure on it, accord­ing to the rules the sur­vey-taker had. Which she was­n’t meant to show me, as they expli­citly stated the sur­vey-takers were not to explain the ques­tions to people tak­ing the sur­vey (why not? I don’t know, and she did­n’t either.)

Today’s gem was for soft­ware and ser­vices com­pan­ies. I am a con­sult­ant; I don’t sell or resell soft­ware and I don’t write soft­ware pack­ages for people either (I don’t count the odd XSLT stylesheet or XML edit­or cus­tom­iz­a­tion although I guess I could). After say­ing that I don’t cre­ate or resell soft­ware, the ques­tions included what pro­por­tion of my com­pany’s rev­en­ue is from selling soft­ware or hard­ware, what plat­forms the solu­tions run on, and wheth­er my com­pany is a mem­ber of vendor part­ner pro­grams that are designed for soft­ware resellers. More inter­est­ing were the ques­tions about wheth­er I get kick­backs com­mis­sions for recom­mend­ing soft­ware — I assume this must hap­pen although wheth­er people would really admit to it on the phone to a sur­vey-taker is anoth­er mat­ter. (And, for the record, I don’t.)

In all, 27 minutes of oddball ques­tions with a large pro­por­tion of answers being “the ques­tion is not applic­able” and the sur­vey-taker ask­ing “so do you want me to put you down as ‘don’t know’ or ‘refuse to answer’?” And, of course, she did­n’t know why ‘not applic­able’ was not con­sidered a reas­on­able answer. I hope the sur­vey pur­vey­ors can make more sense out of the answers than I could of the questions.