The internet turns out to be very useful again. A couple of months back, I got an email from a newsletter source I am subscribed to, offering me the chance to look at a new site in beta mode, on the grounds that they would send me a survey to fill in some time after that, and I’d have the chance to either choose to fill in or ignore the survey. Seemed like a pretty good deal to me, so I went over to have a look at the site.

A few weeks later, as promised, a survey appeared in my email, asking me to go to a website and fill in the details and opinions I had on the beta site. I went to the survey and filled it in, on the grounds that (1) I’ve done market research and it’s hard to get responses, (2) I had some opinions on how to improve the site design, and (3) they were offering a $10USD Amazon gift voucher to those people who filled in the survey. I was after a book worth ~$24USD so the chance to get it for $10USD less was a good opportunity.

I filled in the survey, and waited for the certificate to arrive by mail. It never did. After a few weeks, I emailed the people who did the survey and asked when the certificates were to be sent out. Apparently, according to my first contact, I should have received the certificate immediately. This did not obviously happen, so I was promised it would be looked into.

Four weeks later, no response had ever come from it, and I was irritated to think that I’d been duped into giving my answers under the pretext of getting a gift certificate when, it appeared to me, there was no certificate forthcoming. I sent another response, thanking them for opening my eyes to the way their company did business, and that it was the sort of thing that gave market research a bad name. I also sent an email to the people who were launching the site, since the people doing the market research and the people launching the site were two different organisations, asking to be removed from their mailing lists, and my records removed from their database since the company they employed to do research for them had sullied their reputation also.

A few hours later, I received another response saying it had been passed along to someone else to take care of, that my original contact thought it had been resolved, and she was terribly sorry about the inconvenience.

A few hours after that, I received another response from - presumably - the person who was supposed to have taken care of it, with a gift voucher to the value of $20USD instead of $10USD to make up for the delay. I was mollified by this gesture, and figured I’d take care of it in a day or two to order the book I wanted.

Two days later, another email arrived from someone else in the same market research firm with another gift certificate for $10USD attached. It appeared to be an entirely different response, from a person unaware that there was already a $20USD certificate given to me. A question of morals for me then arose - should I write back to this person, thanking for their efforts, but that I had already received a gift certificate, or just use it? If I wrote back, they might take it back off me. On the other hand, they might be embarrassed and just let me keep it, relieving my guilt, but leaving me with the money.

I thought about it for four more days, allowing them time to realise their mistake if they wanted, and then figured that I was entitled to the second gift voucher as well, on the grounds that (1) it was their fault I had not simply received the $10USD voucher straight away when I did the survey, (2) it was their fault for not consulting within the company before authorising the sending of another gift voucher, and (3) my opinion is worth three times that of any other person. Okay, so the last one is a bit of a stretch, but it helped to alleviate my guilty feeling, so it counts…*grin*

The long and the short of it is that I was able to purchase my book through Amazon, paying for the product and posting with the gift vouchers, and still had money to spare. Considering the book would have cost me $50AUD to purchase before I went, and taken three weeks to get in, a little bit of waiting, and a slightly irked tone in an email has ultimately netted me a free book, and saved us a substantial amount of money.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001