Survey Service

I’m tired of feeling baited-and-switched by companies that ask customers to “rate their experiences,” when they’re actually being requested to rate the individual employee(s) they were interacting with. I understand that companies don’t really want feedback from the public; a lot of it is negative, some of it is completely unreasonable and just about all of it is geared towards customer priorities, rather than business (or shareholder, if we’re being honest) priorities. No business wants to hear that their processes are clunky or their inventory selection is lacking. And when they’re the ones writing the surveys, they don’t have to. I get it.

But an interaction with an individual employee (or three) is not the same as an interaction with the company as a whole, or even some function or division of the company. A customer support representative can be perfectly charming and willing to help, but be stymied by disempowering policies or simply a lack of the resources needed to serve the customer. And that leaves aside all of the various touchpoints that come into play both before and after the interaction.

And for any rating system that works on a scale of 1 to X, so long as X is greater than 2, a score of X-1 shouldn’t be considered a black mark. The expectation that people are going to do absolutely amazing work, and blow people away with every interaction is unrealistic. If give someone four stars out of five, I shouldn’t have a supervisor contacting me to offer up their head on a plate. Five out of five is not my base level of expectation; leaving some room at the top of the scale for truly exceptional service should be an option.

In the end, it dissuades me from engaging with these surveys and ratings systems. Service jobs can be hard enough as it is, people don’t need the added stress of me being supposedly the one person on Earth who still sees a difference between “did the thing I asked of them,” and “completely blew me away.” Especially when the responses are not anonymous.

Okay, rant over. At least until I can corner someone a little higher up the food chain in one of these companies. Then, I’m going to give them a talking-to.