A couple of weeks ago I popped into my local branch of Barclays to pay my credit card bill. As I was about to leave the cashier politely asked if I’d answer some questions using a little keyboard on the counter.

You may also have seen one of these dashboards if you bank with Barclays. They are little push-button devices that ask you questions about your banking experience.

This is an attempt by Barclays to improve its customer service, and you may, as I did, think it worthwhile keying in your answers in the hope they succeed.

Then you look at the questions and realise this is a waste of time.

One of the questions asked on behalf of the cashier was: “I made you feel special?”. You have four replies to choose from: Absolutely, I’d say so, Not really, and Not at all.

I don’t think a bank cashier has ever made me feel “absolutely special” and I’m not sure they ever could. I answered the question accordingly, pressing the “not at all” button, even though the cashier was perfectly polite.

Another question was: “I would recommend Barclays?” and offered similar answers. I tend not to spend much time debating with friends the merits of banks and the truthful answer to the question is “not a chance”, despite me being perfectly satisfied with the bank, until this survey started.

The only question you’d think could prove useful asked how long I’d queued. Except it won’t be much use either because people standing in queues overestimate the time they spend waiting. Unless they’ve got a stopwatch, most people queuing for two minutes will hit the button saying five.

The stats Barclays is getting from this survey will bear little relation to reality and provide the bank with no useful data on which to base corporate decisions.

It is unfair to pick on Barclays, though, when there are countless firms that have embraced business intelligence (BI) systems and metric-driven management, and are yet to realise that they are measuring the wrong things.

This would be bad enough if all you are doing is wasting time and money. But the real problem is that basing decisions on irrelevant key performance indicators will often lead businesses to develop dysfunctional strategies. Barclays, for instance, is gathering such misleading customer satisfaction data that there is a risk it could launch a costly campaign to improve customer service, when maybe customers are perfectly content already.

Implementing enterprise-wide BI systems may be tough, but the real challenge in developing metric-driven management models lies in the traditional skills of knowing what to ask and how to interpret the results.