Please rate how I served you perfectly

[lindyhop]

At J. C. Penney when you make a purchase you slide your credit card through the thingy and then sign the little screen. After that a survey question comes up and you're supposed to rate the salesperson on a five point scale with three being the expected level. One salesperson asked me to complete it but since then no one has. I'm usually waiting for my receipt and merchandise at that point so I don't even notice what's on the screen. But Friday night as I started to walk away I noticed the girl reach over and clear the screen by pressing the highest rating category.

All kinds of companies (including my employer) use customer service surveys but what does it really mean? I drive a Saturn and they always send out surveys after I bring my car in for service. Early on they told me that I should let them know if there was anything that was preventing me from giving them the top rating in all categories. So I always rate them that way (unless I actually had an issue) so they don't call me to ask what they could have done better.

My inclination on surveys is to rarely use the highest rating because who's really perfect? But I know from how my own company looks at things that they expect to see the highest rating and that anything else is practically failure. But does it mean anything when the employee games the system by answering the survey themselves or telling the customer how to do it?

And how could the salesperson in J. C. Penney have exceeded my expectations? If I expected that she was going to ignore me for ten minutes while she talked on the phone with her boyfriend and then throw my purchase on the floor and stomp on it before shoving it in a bag, well then she exceeded my expectations by actually doing her job. But she did what she was supposed to do and isn't that enough?