All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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The Scourge of Closed Option Questionnaires

Problem Practices, , , ,

Most organizations are disinclined to invest in the labor to directly address a consumer question or complaint. Their pattern of not wanting to authentically listen mirrors our modern malady of wanting to be heard more than we want hear.

Organizations now operate with the perceived need to survey customers about the quality of the service they received. The impulse is fine.  They want satisfied consumers.  And they would welcome high ratings that can be part of their advertising and marketing campaigns.  Then, too, many consumers now understand a thing or two about the logic of consumer behavior. They know that a failing business may only see a customer once, especially if competitors are just a click away.

Savvy customers and attentive businesses are all good.  But the instruments for measuring customer satisfaction are often facile. The best tool for learning about a customer’s experience is a live representative ready to trouble-shoot a problem.  But person to person contact is increasingly rare.  Most organizations are not inclined to invest in the staff that would require. Their pattern of not wanting to authentically listen mirrors our modern malady of wanting to frame a conversation before the other can respond. I have noticed that even at auto service departments, agents are often too busy keying in routine data about my car, such as mileage, to ask what kind of service it may need. Most don’t even ask why I made the appointment.

But the worst offender in the measurement of customer satisfaction is the online, phone or mail questionnaire.  Most are written to be tallied and converted into a number for each item. You know the drill:

“How would you rank your service experience?”

Very Good      Good        Fair          Poor

Would you recommend this product to others?       Yes         No

For obvious reasons these are called a “closed” option questions. Your attitude is to be gleaned from the adjective that you identify frequently from an outline questionnaire.

I recently completed a multi-page questionnaire for a newly purchased car.  And, incredibly, even with all the questions, the carmaker failed to set up a form that would let me clearly state my reason’s for the purchase.  (If you are interested, key controls were not on a fussy touch screen.)

Closed option questions appear to be good for the organization because they can be tabulated, hence, quantified, hence assumed “objective.” The bean counters among us love them. Even as a college teacher, I was required to give out these uniform questionnaires. But much of the feedback is coated in a thick fog of ambiguity.  For a student, useful feedback to a professor is not judging class lectures to be only “fair,” but their reasons for circling this term.

If any organization asks a really good question about their service (i.e., “What was most disappointing about your experience?”), the organization might learn something, but this kind of open-option question cannot be numerically tallied.  And A.I. technology is not that smart.  A person within the company would have to read the statement and engage in some active problem solving (especially if the same problem is mentioned by others). That’s an interpretive act: the kind of creative analysis we are squeezing out of routine consumer practices. To be sure, a car manufacturer will get a great deal of attention from a company representative who wants to sell them a zillion tires. The consumer looking for just a good set of four?  Not so much.

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The Irony of Expansive War Music

Problem Practices, Reviews, , , , , ,

When are atrocities so bad that any attempt to represent them in beautiful music is a bit dishonest?

Unlikely as it seems, The City of Prague Philharmonic has produced wonderful Hollywood film scores for years.  They play the skill of the original studio musicians recording in the Sony/Streisand and  Warner/Eastwood scoring stages in Los Angeles. But listening to their sumptuous scores from war movies written by John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and others reveals a vexing irony. It turns out that the music we humans want to hear while watching portrayals of the worst of our actions is frequently vivid and beautiful.  The uglier the war, the more affecting the score seems to be, as in John Williams’ “Hymn to the Fallen” used in Steven Spielberg’s searing World War II drama, Saving Private Ryan.

There seems to be a pattern in which we convert our presumed hatred of combat and death into laments that ennoble what should perhaps remain ugly.  When are atrocities so bad that any attempt to represent them in beautiful music is a bit dishonest?

There’s no shortage of answers.  Classic war films predictably tend to define “our side” as especially heroic, and they are not necessarily wrong. But the musical jingoism that often creeps in is maybe more reassuring that it should be.

More to the point, music is a non-verbal abstract of feeling. Empathy for war’s casualties is a way for the heart to offer its own compensating response.  Because violence begets regret and loss, it has its own rich musical vocabulary.  Musical laments are especially their own forms of  consolement. Williams’ popular theme from Schindler’s List, written in D- minor is a sorrowful expression for victims and survivors of the Holocaust.  The conversion of the core idea within a film into music has rarely been more effective.

Director, Stephen Spielberg, seems to understand that what is harrowing to watch on film might be tamed and explained by the universals expressed in musical conventions that we already know.  It also helps if you are working with John Williams.

Following a very different logic, it may also be true that war music can also perform a tribal function.  It asks those who respond to it to recognize group norms of pride, vindication and moral superiority that are often implicit in the musical tropes of groups bound by a shared and just cause.  Simple and primitive, perhaps, but listening to the Prague musicians saw their way through the music of Max Steiner’s score for Sergeant York (1941), or Randy Edelman’s for Gettysburg (1993), or Maurice Jarre’s for The Longest Day confirms that we can feel tribal vindication for even the darkest of acts.