A while back, I got an email from PNC asking me to fill out a survey:
As a valued PNC customer, we would like to invite you to participate in an online survey about PNC credit card satisfaction and expectations. Your opinions are extremely important and will help PNC develop products that are most relevant and meaningful to its customers. The study will take around 15 minutes of your time.
…
PNC has asked Gfk Custom Research, LLC, an independent research company, to conduct this study on our behalf.
As it turned out, there were something like a hundred questions. There were questions that assumed you had opinions about things and forced you to pick an answer. It was rife with company-centric terminology that had me confused as to what I was answering questions about. There was widespread abuse of the checkbox and huge, complicated two-dimensional matrixes of multiple choice questions.
Basically, it was a lousy survey. I wish I had taken more screenshots. By the time I thought of it, I had gotten to these questions:
“I’ve begun to notice other credit cards”
Needless to say, I found this question rather odd and took a picture of it. Then, there was the very next question:
“Other credit cards are looking more and more attractive”
Well. Huh. That’s not how I normally think about credit cards, but okay. I mean, I don’t really think about credit cards much at all, which is kind of an underlying problem with this survey. Finally, there was this disconcerting question:
“I’d like to rekindle a relationship with an old credit card”
Based on these questions, I strongly suspect that this is a case of GfK taking questions from PNC’s marketing department and throwing them right into the survey. Who talks about credit cards like this? Surely not anyone that doesn’t think about selling credit cards day in and day out.