Editor's note: Joseph Duket is president of Q&A, Inc., a Smyrna, Ga., research firm.

As a marketing researcher, I have acquired a hobby of collecting comment cards whenever and wherever I find them. These innocuous little cards come in every size and shape imaginable, from official-looking trifolds addressed to "Chief Executive Officer" to simple index cards with a few lines for open-ended feedback. The one thing which almost all cards have in common, however, is that they paint a distorted picture of customer satisfaction.Studies have shown that 26 out of 27 dissatisfied customers - 96 percent - never voluntarily complain. Yet companies from mom-and-pop to Fortune 100 still rely heavily on these cards for measuring customer satisfaction. Compounding the dubious reliability of comment cards, companies create further bias in the design of their rating scales. As shown in the chart below, one must wonder how confused customers are with this semantic hodgepodge.With the exception of one company that didn't think highly enough of itself to warrant an excellent score (very good was its top rating) and another that chose to deceive itself by assigning below average as its lowest score, the only terms which seem to be universally accepted are excellent and poor. All other terms and ratings points in between are nebulous to say the least.According to Funk & Wagnalls, the term excellent means "being of the very best quality." As a superlative term, it requires no qualifier or adjective to increase its impact. One person or company can not be more excellent than another. If you're doing the best job or providing the best quality, no one can do better.For the word poor, however, Funk & Wagnalls uses the synonyms inferior and unsatisfactory in its definition. Confusion arises when the word inferior is described as "lower in quality, worth or adequacy; mediocre; ordinary." Mediocre is then defined as "of only average qualit...