Our land line phones were out of service for more than a day recently, a frankly shocking and distressing event. Oddly, the VOIP still worked, and so did the Internet, intermittently.
There are two business people working in this house, and it's the other guy's job to deal with this kind of thing. So he called the phone company on his VOIP line, to request service on my business land line. [Still with me?]
About a week later, I got a call on the now-functional business line for a post-service survey. I said "you need to talk to the guy who handled this" and offered his number. Survey company says "no, for validity of our survey we need to talk to the person at this number". I explained. They dug in. Net result, they preferred not to get feedback rather than call the person who dealt with the problem.
Please note this is a real business number that I pay real business rates for. So this survey would have been evaluating the business support or perhaps SME support, but not residential phone support. So how can this make any sense?
I found this whole thing rather baffling, but worse, it clearly invalidates their results in my view. In an effort to ensure rigor, they have created tremendous sampling bias. Their validity process is invalid. And both this big company and their research agency should know better!
But now you know better, dear reader, and will not make this bush-league mistake.
