We love our car dealer, we actually do. They look after us well. You could picnic on the floor of their service department, it's so clean. The organization prides itself on service, and wants to do well on the customer satisfacton index.
In fact, they are so focused on this that they help their customers anticipate and respond to the questionnaire even before it arrives!
"...please take the time to complete the survey with all 10's if we met and exceeded all your expectations"
It's hard to say what impact this approach is actually having on the feedback they receive. Certainly the letter provides a clear indication that they are trying hard.
One thing I do wonder about is this -- does their approach mean that their actual results are almost useless to them in terms of monitoring and improving? It might. You'd need a statistician to help you determine this based on comparing sets of data.
There's an interesting thread on LinkedIn discussing the challenges of actual cheating on this kind of survey, and how it can be detected using statistical methods.
My take:
If you want to know what's really going on with your customers, you probably need to go beyond this kind of automatic approach. Or at least supplement it with some telephone interviews or some good qualitative research.
Another problem with expectations is that they are always moving up, based on your past performance. So exceeding expectations becomes exceedingly difficult.
