If you’ve ever designed or taken a survey, you’ve probably encountered a Likert-type question. For these questions, the survey-taker rates his or her impressions about a given statement or experience on a scale, usually from 1 to 5 or 1 to 7, with words to guide what the points on the scale mean. For example:

As someone who’s written and taken plenty of surveys, I get a kick out of Likert-type wording creeping into my everyday life. If someone asks me how my dinner was, I imagine myself placing it on one of those scales — “good” or “very good” or “excellent”? (“not very delicious,” “delicious,” “extremely delicious”?) I recently encountered a couple of businesses using different Likert-like endpoints in their marketing and communications. In one case, a doctor’s office I visit has declared a mission to provide “very good service.” The office’s automated appointment reminder points out that the call is part of the office’s “effort to provide you with very good service,” and a recent communication asked me to please notify the office if anything was “less than very good.” Every time I hear this, I giggle. “Very good” can be a reasonable endpoint for a Likert-type question (as a complement to “very poor,” for example), but it also has the effect of seeming like a low bar. Why strive for “very good”? Why not go all the way to “excellent”? On the other hand, I spotted a truck for a carpet installation service driving down Highway 101 over the weekend, and its advertisement promised “the most outstanding service experience ever.” Not just outstanding — the most outstanding ever? Now that’s a company that’s not afraid to aim high! So: Set the bar lower, presumably expecting to vault over it? Or go for sky-high expectations from the start? I’m not sure it matters as long as the actual service is the best it can be, but the two approaches certainly leave me with different feelings about a business’s confidence in its ability to deliver. What do you think?