Why you still need human being to measure stuff

This could be the silliest survey ever. I recently lost my stylus for my HP iPAQ and ordered a replacement from their on-line store, since you can't buy them in a store any more apparently. So today I received what has to be the silliest  email ever: 

Dear Customer,

Approximately 1 month ago, you purchased or registered the following HP product(s): HP iPAQ Universal Stylus Kit

As part of HP's continuous improvement program, we are interested in receiving your feedback getting these HP products up and running for the first time. It will take about 10 minutes and also provides an opportunity for you to instantly alert HP to any issues or concerns you are currently having. Your feedback will help us to continually improve the experience we deliver to our customers.

To participate in the survey, simply follow this link

Take the survey

Thank you for your participation!

Best Regards,

HP Total Customer Experience & QualityWeb Survey.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Mark Hurd's obsessions with metrics and HP's desire to measure everything but do you really need to know how long it took me to take a small plastic object out of a package and start using it? It's a stylus for pete's sake!I figured out how to use them while I was still in diapers, but back then they were called sticks.

Don't get me wrong,I'm all for customer satisfaction surveys, but this is a classic example of how a survey can actually result in a less satisfied customer, simply because they left everything up to an automated system.

Seems like an ordinary human might be able to go thru the list of products purchased and at least eliminate those things that have no moving parts and that replace parts that came with the product and presumably  people have known how to use since they first turned the product on.

More importantly, rather than spending the money on surveys like this, HP could improve satisfaction far faster by hiring better support personnel.

Comments

[Christen Dybenko]

Haha! Great find.

It's great how those kinds of emails are taking more heat these days as consumers expect (and deserve) a real human on the other end.

I'd love to see more examples.

[Kate Hartley]

Absolutely brilliant - that's just made me laugh out loud. It would be interesting to measure the impact of automated systems on decreasing customer satisfaction. Maybe one for HP to survey!