This is what a dry twig sounds like.

I got a marketing call the other day, and it was the third attempt by someone to find out what stores I had recently shopped at and what I liked about them. They got about halfway through the first sentence of their script, and I told them -

Now listen here. If you want to measure customer engagement, I understand that and it would be really great if the store manager came up to me once in a while and asked me about my shopping experience, but instead some consultant has sold them on the idea that they need to sell third party surveys and all it's doing is trying to create a revenue stream for the consultant out of thin air instead of finding out if you have engaged customers. Why should I talk to you? I don't have a relationship with you. I'm not inclined to tell you anything. You know what, this is something that I've been mad about for a long time and you really shouldn't bear the brunt of that so I'm going to hang up the phone now.

*Click*

I admit, I kinda snapped like a dry twig there.

What makes me even more mad about third-party surveys and information gathering is that the stores have made the information completely useless most of the time. Sprint is the worst offender that I can think of in that regard, but there are other stores that do the same thing - the employee has something at stake if the survey results are not perfect, which leads to store associates and phone support people having to end the call with "Please give me a perfect score when they call you for a survey or else they'll torture me in a pit full of rabid slugs and light jazz".

Do you want to find out of you have engaged customers? The best way is to find out what they want, yourself, so that you are in a position to deliver a good customer experience if that's actually possible. Everybody has a few customers that will complain no matter what you do, and a few customers that have unyielding brand loyalty that is hard to shake, and those represent the statistical far ends of your customer spectrum. For everyone else in the middle, I'm not convinced that a third-party survey that's likely to polarize the data is the best way. The perceived problem with asking customers yourself is that they're likely to say everything is fine, until it isn't, and that's another way that the data is skewed. Consider the two scenarios - taking the time to know your customers yourself and enhancing your knowledge about the people you provide goods and/or services for, or paying a bunch of people that don't really know your customer at all to sit on the phone and annoy them? Another advantage you have gathering information yourself is that you know more about each customer's history than the dude in a cube farm reading off a script does, and it will be easier for you to combine what the customer says and what the customer does into a clearer picture of who they are as a customer.

Now after that, if you still really want survey data, just get the data and don't find a way to skew it before you look at it. Don't put yourself in a situation where employees have to bias the data by telling the customers how to answer it - how the survey is answered depends on how your customer interprets the questions, and since the goal is to learn things about your customers, let the answers tell the story on their own. Results are going to be analog, or digitally sampled analog, but not digital.

At this point I'd like to give a big shoutout to my local GameStop, for easing up on the scripted prompts when they talk to me and actually talking to me to find out what I like.

Food, Food, and... almost food.

I have three things to report in the food arena. Two of them are undoubtedly, unquestionably, food. The third thing, I'm feeling like it's not really food, even though it's something I write on the grocery list on a regular basis.

On the way home from work the other night, I asked my youngest child what he wanted for dinner. Typically, there are only two answers. On weekends, he seems to ask for macaroni & cheese with SPAM in it. The other answer is "Hangurgers". Yes, that is how my three-year old pronounces it. I am going to have to call Steve Martin about that and see if that gag in the sub-mediocre "Pink Panther" remake was his or the other writer's gag.

In an effort to appease both the adults and the children, I did the unthinkable in this economy, I applied the "separate but equal" treatment. It was not my original intention, but I didn't really think that I wanted plain old greasy french fries, and I spotted something in the freezer section that made me think that doing a separate dinner for the adults would work.

Alexia spicy sweet potato fries.

They were good by themselves, as long as they were just crispy enough (don't kill them in the oven, though). They were also good with mayo. The chipotle flavor doesn't make sense with ketchup, though. The kids had tater tots instead - sweet potato fries are 'weird' and chipotle is too spicy for them anyway. These fries I will definitely get again.

The second thing I would like to report in the food arena is Taco Bell Shrimp Tacos. Six shrimp, lettuce, mayo, and pico de gallo. Overall, the flavor was very balanced - the shrimp worked very well with the pico sauce. There was nothing spectacular about the shrimp, but they also were not as small as I had heard from initial reports from elsewhere on the web. In this particular instance, it make the steak soft taco that I had with it not seem as good. The person I was eating with commented that he had steak soft tacos from that same location a few days before and they were better, so maybe we just got a bum part of the cow, making for an unfair comparison. I don't know if the shrimp tacos are going to be a limited time item or not, but it may limit my ability to go to Taco Bell with my steak-loving wife, as there are lots of allergy warnings about shellfish and my wife is one of the afflicted in this case. Most of the time we don't have cross-contamination problems unless it's someplace like Long John Silver's where everything ends up in the fryer. OK, enough with the allergy talk. To sum up - not bad, not good enough to make up for the potential inconvenience to my spouse.

The third thing, and arguably not a food thing although I consider it so, is -
Metal Gear Solid Mountain Dew Game Fuel.

You will probably notice that most of the writing on the carton in the article I linked to is in Japanese - who knows if this promotion is coming to the states? Maybe everyone here will still be too busy with the God of War III promotion. The number of people that I know that have played the Metal Gear games is few, and the number that own a PSP is even fewer. I can only presume that this is an attempt to bring stealth action to a new generation. Since there are several collectible cans, and I only see one color, I assume it's only one flavor. Judging from the can, it's the one I wasn't as fond of from the World of Warcraft promotion. I guess we will find out sometime in June?