In late July, I had an appointment for a treadmill stress-test at Omaha’s Methodist Hospital. They told me the process would be over in an hour, but it took about two hours, due to another patient having some sort of crisis during their stress-test.
They had me put on a gown, they stuck an I-V "dye" drip in back of my hand, and they pasted about six electrodes to my chest, after shaving and applying something like sand paper to the parts of the chest where the electrodes were attached. Then they had me lie on my side on a hard table, to wait. It was very uncomfortable. The first nurse said that there was supposed to be a pillow on the table, but did nothing to obtain one. Every several minutes some technician or nurse would stop in to ask if I was ready for them. (I was always ready.) But it turned out that someone needed to do something to me first, and that person was, I guess, taking care of the crisis next door. At least one of these visitors also mentioned that I was supposed to have a pillow, but did nothing to acquire one. If memory serves, the first nurse came back in, and again mentioned that I was supposed to have a pillow, but again did nothing to obtain one.
These people were all pleasant and friendly. For example, they had a lot of friendly chats amongst themselves, that I could not help but over-hear. (One of them was pregnant with twins, but did not know the genders of the babes-to-be, and so had not yet spent the time to come up with names.)
But two hours later, when the whole process was over, I still did not have a pillow.
A week or two after the test, I received a several page survey from Methodist Hospital asking a bunch of questions about how I thought they had done during the test. You see they really "care" about my opinion. (They also run frequent, slick TV ads about how much they "care.")
Marketers, and management gurus, say that organizations need to invest in surveys and the like to figure out what the customer wants and needs. And Clayton Christensen advocates spending resources to figure out what "job" the customer needs to have done. And maybe, sometimes, it does take surveys and research.
But sometimes it is obvious that the customer needs a pillow.
What is missing is not a survey, or statistical analysis.
What is missing is the incentive for someone to go get the pillow.
P.S. You may wonder, then, if it is simply a mistake for the hospital to send out the survey? I suspect that those who send out the survey are not making a mistake, but are trying to get a different job done than the one that appears to be intended. It appears that they are trying to find out what customers want and need. But maybe they already know that. Maybe they are mainly sending out the survey so that if anyone asks if they are "customer-oriented" they can whip out the survey to prove that yes-indeed, they sure are. In other words, the point of the survey is not to learn about customers; it is to cover rear-ends.