Not only is Sprint seemingly incapable of solving simple technical issues (see my posts for March 8, March 14, March 21, March 28, and March 30), they’ve hired an incompetent to implement their online Customer Satisfaction Survey. I wish I could give you a link. If there’s a better example of how not to implement an online survey, I haven’t seen it.

Their first mistake was maximizing the browser window when I clicked on the survey link that came in my email. There is no reason for a Web site to maximize a window. It’s certainly not a very friendly thing to do, and is not calculated to make customers report favorably on their customer service experience.

The content of the survey is better than most online surveys I’ve seen, I’ll give them that. The questions actually are well worded and presented in a reasonably good order. The formatting wasn’t too bad, either. I especially appreciated the lack of bright colors and fontophilia that I see on too many surveys.

But I got a little annoyed when I selected the answer to question number four and a new maximized survey window popped up. Then I got really ticked off when I clicked the Submit button and another maximized survey window popped up. With three survey windows on my screen showing my survey in various stages of completion, I honestly don’t know if they received my survey response.  At this point I couldn’t care less.

I’ll be the first to admit that online surveys are difficult to do well. I should know, having worked for Inquisite for almost four years. But the mistakes that Sprint made with this one are amateurish mistakes that any competent Web developer knows to avoid. Maybe I should have somebody at Inquisite give Sprint a call.