You walk into your general practitioner's office. You have some pain in your knee from an old sports injury and it's starting to cause concern. When the doctor comes in, she doesn't start by asking questions about your condition. Instead, she hands you a short survey with some broad questions -- including things like, "When it comes to selecting a heart medicine, what do you look for?

Surveys. They're supposed to take the pulse of a company's performance through the eyes of their customers. However, they frequently deliver the opposite -- a veiled and biased pile of data that is used only for your monthly performance reports. This happens because many organizations are prone to customer deafness. Surveys are constructed based on what companies want to hear, rather than on what customers need to say.