lol, I have the same problem
@Consolation - I am not familiar with the survey you mentioned. I meant the 10 year census.
Government surveys seem like a different thing than customer satisfaction surveys that are done in service of private corporations.
What I am struck by with the corporations is the absolute irony of stating that they want honest customer feedback in order to improve their service (which is really their profitability, but okay), yet rendering the completion of the survey meaningless as most of us don’t want to be responsible, individually or collectively, for the employment status of someone who may be just adequate. The way this is implemented, with service providers begging for all tens, is simply beyond my pay grade as the purchaser of a car or phone. Awkward all around. So, meaningless 10’s it is…
Obviously, those companies use their surveys as a stick to beat the employees with, rather than to gather any real information about how it is to interact with their organization.
well actually no. as cynical as i might be, my corp collects about 2,000 surveys a day and the feedback includes key customer satisfaction indicators, yes but also spoken verbatims that are listened to, categorized by a speech-to-text engine that provides some insights and some of the worst, detailed experiences are played for people who manage the product, price marketing components. i have an entire team of specially trained reps who make calls to users with particularly bad experiences or get stuck in red tape. your voice is one in a haystack but i spend my entire day looking for the needle.
but let me add, the supervisors of reps that don’t have good customer satisfaction metric? like “rate the experience with the rep that you just spoke with…” yeah - i want those to get targeted coaching so that they don’t give bad service. reps have a really tough job and some people are better at providing good service naturally and some people need coaching.
My old company was a proponent of surveys and monitoring calls of their CSR’s. They went a step further and hired outside firms to call and pretend they either were our customers (actually gave us the customer’s name and address), or they really hoped to become our customers. We were rated on a scale of 1 to 5 and lord help anyone who didn’t score at least a 4 or 5 in any of the categories. But we soon figured out when we were getting survey calls because in a span of a few hours each of us were talking to unusual customers asking weird questions. One time the “new customer” mispronounced the town they just moved to very badly to me. 
Once we knew the calls were coming in, we tailored our responses in order to get 5’s on the survey. I recall making a list of area codes and phone numbers which I kept near my phone to alert me when I was being surveyed.
Monitoring calls involved a percentage of our incoming calls being taped to be reviewed by our supervisor. Our supervisor was an extremely hard grader who often graded us below average and refused to hear our thoughts. Whenever the call was being taped I could hear background noise and static, however, so I went the extra mile to satisfy the customer. Every call was split into five parts and we had minimum standards to meet in each part. Sometimes it would get ridiculous when you received a 0 on one part due to a technicality, and then be given a low grade and extra work to improve your telephone skills. This was one area that made many CSR’s upset and angry and they would mope around for the next week.
One of my customers (a CSR) wrote a nice letter to the company about my help which was passed upwards to our home office and put in the next national newsletter. It was also noted in my next review. So think about how you can help the person out who just went out of their way for you, or who made you feel special.
I often hear canned responses from CSR’s that tell me they were trained by the same company that I was. So I try to answer surveys whenever someone gives me excellent service and I have the time to answer the survey questions.