Editor’s note: Jim Slevin is manager of field quality engineering at Advanced Micro Devices, a supplier of integrated circuits based in Sunnyvale, Calif. John Chisholm is president of CustomerSat.com, a Menlo Park, Calif., customer satisfaction measurement and market research firm.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a global supplier of integrated circuits for the personal and networked computer and communications markets. AMD produces processors, flash memories, programmable logic devices, and products for communications and networking applications. Founded in 1969 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., AMD had revenues of $2 billion in 1996.

Prior to 1997, AMD had for many years conducted its annual customer satisfaction, loyalty, and value survey of over 200 of its largest customers through face-to-face and phone interviews and postal and fax questionnaires. In search of a more streamlined approach for its 1997 survey, and to make providing feedback more convenient for its customers, the company turned to CustomerSat.com, a Menlo Park. Calif., firm specializing in measuring customer satisfaction and conducting market research using E-mail and the Web.

The result was, to the best of our knowledge, the first annual, worldwide customer satisfaction survey by a Fortune 500 company whose using the Internet as its primary medium.

The Internet offers many advantages for customer satisfaction measurement (CSM). Survey results are typically available in a few weeks, with early results available in days or even hours. Customers can complete questionnaires whenever they choose from wherever they choose. Keyboard, mouse, and computer screen make answering surveys easier than handwriting responses, especially open-ended ones, and faster than being read a questionnaire over the phone. Additionally, human interviewer influences that can bias responses are eliminated. Finally, the costs of Internet survey deployment...