It isn’t nice, but I rarely stay on the line to answer the “brief” surveys that companies ask you to take after speaking to a customer service representative. Usually, the Survey isn’t so brief and it’s tedious to respond to ranking questions.

But, on a recent call to Delta Airlines, I was asked to answer one question. I was intrigued — what was the question? — so I stayed on the line and it was this: “Would you hire the last person you spoke to at Delta Airlines?”

Yes or No?

The conversation was fresh in my mind and I was happy with my experience so I answered “yes.”

The question made me think about the conversation in an entirely different way. All of a sudden the experience was about me. In a split second a thousand thoughts ran through my mind: did I get the information I wanted? Was the customer service representative helpful? Was he friendly? Would I really consider hiring him?

I’m pretty confident that Delta employees know they only get a one-question shot for an up or down rating so they need to be on their game. Ergo, in my view, you’re likely to get better customer service. (Note: You can’t blame phone reps for recent delays on Delta because of a massive storm at the airline’s Atlanta hub).

The One-Question Survey

I turned to Survey Monkey, the leader of online surveys and, sure enough, they offer one-question surveys. Of course, not every question can be answered with a yes or no. Here is a sample question on Survey Monkey’s website:

You can even share the results on Facebook.

What Would You Ask?

Too often we don’t ask our customers for feedback. If you’re an independent consultant, with a handful of clients, it’s easy to find out by simply having a conversation at the end of a project. But if you have thousands of customers, you’ll need a develop a survey. Survey Monkey has made that easy. You get instant results.

But as the company says, “In general, you can expect a low response rate if your survey is long, your survey language is complicated, or you send your survey to the wrong audience.”

As it is, most surveys are considered a success if they achieve a 10-15% response rate but the return can be as low as 1-2% if the survey is poorly constructed or there is little incentive to respond.

So why not give the one-question survey a try? You may learn all you need to know with the simple question: “How am I doing?”