Effing Customer Feedback BS

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Also posted on FB.


The current obsession with customer feedback has officially passed the point of annoyance.

At my Ralphs, the employees, from the meat counter to the checkout, are going out of their way to chat me up. After a few friendly turns of phrase, they grin and hand me a paper with their name on it asking that I leave some positive feedback for them on the website. Great, so you're not actually nice, you just want to win the office pool or get a bonus. Thanks so much for using my time to manipulate me into liking you.

I bought my new phone at a Sprint store. The lady set up the phone without saying much to me, though we did chat generally about phones. When it was ready she said to me, "So they're going to call you to ask if you were very satisfied. When they do, I need you to give them positive feedback, so I want to make sure I get everything done on my list." She then rattled off a bullet point in a monotone, then asked, "Have I fully satisfied your questions on yadda yadda?" Then she went on to the next and the next, with the same robotic satisfaction question every time. I wanted to ask, is this a legal debriefing? Do I have to sign some documentation?

All this leads me to say - NO, I'm not satisifed. I don't want to be treated like a point to be won. They look at me and don't see a person that needs help, they see a gold star sticker.

This is everywhere now. Restaurants, clothing stores, everywhere I go. YUCK.

Hey, companies! This isn't helping. I'm about to start using my time to comment on your website how awful this is.

[alphabassettgrrl]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that. I don't mind doing it once or twice, but if everybody does it.... I won't be participating. They want us to take our time to do this? No.

My bank has a script for asking if there's anything else they can do for me, but thankfully my needs are fairly straightforward most of the time. If I had needed something else, I would have told you. It's one thing to personalize the script, to make it feel more natural, but they don't.

[€uroMeinke]

Then there are the apps that periodically have pop ups that ask you to review them and give them 5 stars.

[innerSpaceman]

I've never experienced it quite like this (though I'm barely a typical "consumer" anymore). That said, I don't mind if someone directs me to a customer service survey - but if they dare ask me to rate them or their company highly, I tell them they've just guaranteed I'll do precisely the opposite (though actually I never bother to take the survey at all).

[3894]

So, has anyone here had career repercussions from anonymous surveys?

I have been rewarded probably more than I deserved because of high scores on anonymous teaching surveys when I was a professor. Conversely, I know professors whose careers suffered because they did not get high ratings.

Was I a more effective teacher? Almost certainly not. It was a difference in personality style or academic subject or even the choice of the exact day to hand out the survey forms or how particular individuals felt about the survey process itself.

Yet people's salaries, rank, and even careers were decided largely on collection of anonymous opinion. It was one of the big turn-offs that had me switching careers, even though I won at that game. I absolutely loathed those damn surveys that tried to be both teaching improvement instrument and consumer data. From often tiny and incomplete class samples and without throwing out the outliers or insisting on minimum samples, the administration drew sweeping statistical b.s.

In case you're curious, the only helpful student teaching evaluation forms that help professors don't even exist much anymore. They are the open-ended questions. They don't exist much anymore because of the internet; those answers have sometimes been posted out of context or incompletely.

And so, in conclusion, blech on this kind of data collection and any career consequences.

[katiesue]

I often get the emails where they ask you to rate your experience. That I'm ok with, if I had a great one or a particularly bad one I'll fill it out otherwise I just delete them.

Has anyone ever gotten any follow up from filling one out and pointing out a bad experience? I've filled out two this way when I really was treated poorly by the people I dealt with and I got zero response from either of them. Not even a thank you for filling out our survey.

I'm fine with the here's a survey on the bottom of the receipt thing. I never do them. But I'm not ok with the please rate me highly part. I've gotten that on phone ones too. Please rate me highly. Kind of makes me want to rate them low.

It's also similar to our experience with the dining staff on our cruise. They were really overtly begging for a good tip and rating. The only time we saw the "host" person was to come by and tell us to rate him highly. Yea buddy nice of you to stop by. It was really off putting to me.

Wanted to add I like the surveys where you can type in a specific response. I'd think that would be more useful information in judging than just rating things on a scale. You can let them know specifically what was good or bad.

[alphabassettgrrl]

The open-ended survey questions are harder to analyze en masse, and I think that's why we see less of them lately. Much easier to have number ratings, that the computer can collectivize and analyze. The downside is that the simple numbers rankings don't tell you as much about how you can improve what you're doing.

[Alex]

Oh, the one time I actually did one of those surveys was for our Honda dealer. They were generally great for us but one time we had an off experience. So I gave less than perfect scores on the survey attempt.

Then Honda corporate hounded me for weeks until I took their call and just would not let me go until they'd hashed it to death. Convinced me to never fill out a customer service survey again.

Plus, seeing the output of various customer feedback tools at work, they definitely can shed light on important issues but mostly they just highlight that a huge portion of the population is stupider than average and average isn't all that bright.

[Kevy Baby]

Hey: our nation's MBA's need to justify their existence!

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Was I a more effective teacher? Almost certainly not. It was a difference in personality style or academic subject or even the choice of the exact day to hand out the survey forms or how particular individuals felt about the survey process itself.Hooray for understanding the huge weaknesses of a system that ends up benefiting you - most people don't care about all that as long as they do well. You rise above the pack as usual, Helen. :)

I'm fine with the here's a survey on the bottom of the receipt thing. I never do them. But I'm not ok with the please rate me highly part. I've gotten that on phone ones too. Please rate me highly. Kind of makes me want to rate them low.Same here. I might start doing that if someone really asks for it, and simply say "they bothered me to rate them highly." That is, if I have the ability to say as much in the standard form, as you guys have pointed out.

Would be nice if people just did their jobs well and management just paid attention to how people are reacting to their employees.

[keith - SuPeR K!]

Then there are the apps that periodically have pop ups that ask you to review them and give them 5 stars.

I'm sick of apps asking me to rate them!

I mean, if ratings and reviews are so important, then give me one list on one screen in one app where I can star my entire list of apps in one go, rather than having to go into the App Store and disrupt whatever I'm doing.

[lashbear]

Having worked in Customer Service for the last (almost) 30 years...

They're called KPI's folks, Key Performance Indicators. And they're driven by the corporate Shareholders.

If you're not performing like a super-human (or should I say, super-inhuman) then you're not wringing maximum profit out of each customer service "opportunity" (read, encounter) and therefore not satisfying NOR meeting the needs of the company. You then get disadvantages like Close Personal Supervision, "Coaching" (read: Nagging) and sometimes financial disadvantages.

You BET I went out of my way to make customers happy, but mostly it was through fear of repercussions (at least, toward the end - no-one likes getting brought into the office and being told they're not doing enough for the company).

So have some pity on the staff (as I see you are doing) and get right up the Management who make these stupid and overdemanding expectations of their staff, just so they look good to the Almighty Shareholder.