Here’s an interesting way to ensure the feedback from customers makes you look good: ask the right questions! After a frustrating experience with AT&T (short version: I switched to automatic bill payment, where they just suck the funds out of your account instead of having you actively make a payment…but when you switch over to that service, it takes some time to kick in, so your next bill won’t get paid – they don’t tell you that, in fact the website indicates that your next bill will be paid automatically, and meanwhile, they remove all the one-click “make a payment” functions from your online account, so you are in limbo where you need to write a check or something once they start nagging you for the missing payment that you thought you’d already made) they sent a customer satisfaction survey (“AT&T Email Support Survey”) that only asked me to rate the service I received against my expectations. It was the familiar Likert scale survey, where the rankings were

1. Much Better than Expected
   
2. Better than Expected
   
3. Just as Expected
   
4. Worse than Expected
   
5. Much Worse than Expected

Nicely done! Who expects good support from a phone company? Not me. But “just as expected” sounds more contented than pessimistic. They could deliver consistently crappy service, but as long as they are within their brand perception of crappy service, everything is A-OK.