A Bad Survey

As I have mentioned before, I just returned last week from a 7- day Norwegian Cruise Line cruise to Bermuda.

A day or so after the cruise, I received an email in my inbox asking me to complete a survey about my cruising experience. I happily complied.

About 3 questions into it, I was a bit suspicious and then about 40 minutes into it, I was tired and glazing over.

One of the very first questions specifically asked if I was in a position dealing with PR or advertising. Hmmm...what are they trying to get at here?

Some errors I found with the survey:

• Way too long. It must have had over 200 questions. After question 30 I was skimming and not really paying close attention to the questions. If they wanted to get an accurate answer, they should have been more conscious of people's time.
• Many of the questions should have been open-ended or at least had an option of filling in a blank, but were forced into multiple-choice questions which were awkward to answer.
• One of the questions actually made me laugh out loud at its ridiculousness: "If you were president of NCL, what is the one thing you would suggest to improve the cruise experience of guests like yourself?" What? What does this even mean? I opted out of answering this question.

It's very important when creating a survey to be conscious of your audience while still achieving the desired results. This survey, I think, did a terrible job at getting the results they needed to see because of its length and poor questions.