Peter Lyons

Maritz: 1 - Very Dissatisfied

May 17, 2009

I bought a new car this fall and a few months later I got a follow-up survey in the mail from Maritz Research. Having a few pieces of feedback to give, such as the orange readout on the Bose sound system being invisible through Sunglasses, I endeavored to fill it out. Holy SAT Test, Batman! The survey is nine jam-packed, small-font pages long. There are 76 officially numbered questions, but many questions involve dozens of individual line-items. See the example below where question 58 asks you to rate 67 individual aspects of the vehicle! Sixty frigging seven! I gave up in frustration long before getting there.

This represents a complete failure to do your job as a market research company. This is their business. Did they exert any effort to make the customer do less work? No. Does the survey include dozens and dozens of line items that completely do not apply to my vehicle because it's not a pick-up truck, and so forth? Yes. Did they select only the really meaningful things for me to rate? No. For example, I am asked to supply my satisfaction level from 5 "Completely Satisfied" to 1 "Very Dissatisfied" on the topic "absence of engine stalling". Give me a break. You need to survey you customers to find out A) your cars stall and B) customers find that unsatisfactory. Please. Do they have any section for free-form comments, unprompted feedback, or even brief descriptions? No. Do they have a special "green traffic light" insert stapled in reading "Your Opinion Counts! Pleas Proceed..."? Yes. Apparently my opinion doesn't count enough for them to create a survey with less complexity than an income tax form. I'm hunting around for the section to fill in my non-farm income.

Please rate your satisfaction with this Maritz Research survey:

5 - Completely Satisfied
4 - Very Satisfied
3 - Satisfied
2 - Somewhat Dissatisfied
1 - Very Dissatisfied

Maritz Survey Fail