If you contact the customer support of your utility company, phone carrier, bank, or other service provider youâll likely be flooded with requests to rate the experience and provide feedback. Likewise, corporate websites and email communications often solicit feedback via embedded buttons or links to online forms.
Whatâs with this corporate obsession with customer feedback?
Are these huge piles of feedback actually analyzed and acted upon? Is customer feedback some sort of corporate cargo cult? Or maybe clever marketing by vendors of feedback tools and services?
The impression is the feedback is just discarded or ignored.
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Gotta have metrics by which to deny employee raises. đ
Yup. This all boils down to NPS.
NPS is that 1-10 star system they use. No matter what you think it means, like 5 being average or 8 being good, it doesnât matter. NPS and companies use it as:
Raises are usually 3-5% only if your NPS average is above 9.
That is it, it does not mean what you think it means, that is how corporate views it. 10/10 does not mean they went above and beyond and I had the best experience, because to corporate 10/10 âiS HoW EvErY cUsToMeR ShOuLd fEeLâ even though we all know thatâs impossible. If itâs not 10/10 then they did a shit job.
Also note NPS does NOT mean if your issue was solved or how the company is doing. It is purely how you rate that specific human being. Anything against the company the managers will put directly on that personâs head. Literal conversation with my manager went âbut theyâre just mad that they didnât get free productâ, âwell you should have turned that around to make it a 10/10 experienceâ
For example, if you call Comcast because they added a new fee to your account and you get âTerryâ on the phone, sheâll probably tell you there is nothing she can do (because they give her zero power to do anything about it) and that sheâs sorry for the experience. This is probably her job, to talk to angry customers, her job is to soothe you over, not to give away money. So you get the survey after the fact and you give them all 1/10 stars because youâre mad at Comcast, and rightfully so. Except you werenât rating Comcast, you were rating Terry, and that will come up on her review that she didnât perform her job well enough because you were still angry. Terry wonât be getting a raise this year, and youâll still have your fees.
Example 2, you go into Best Buy and you are just looking for a simple cable, say a phone charger or something. âPaulâ comes over and youâre like âOh I just need a USB-C chargerâ and heâs like sure thing, right here, and youâre like great! He helps you check out even. Best Buy sends a survey and youâre like eh what the hell, 7/10, it was a pretty good experience. Wrong, Paul is talked to by his manager in his review on âWhy didnât this customer leave feeling like a 10/10?â, âPaul, we need to talk to you about why you arenât meeting our customer satisfaction targets.â
Oh and the comments? No one who can do anything will read them. Theyâll only be used come review time, and positive ones will be skimmed while negative ones will be picked apart.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk and reading this far. tldr - those surveys are more nefarious than you think, and corporate big wigs think they have all of us summed up in a 10 star system.
At one of my old jobs I remember getting a 9.2 out of 10 on a performance report. When they called me in for a meeting I was thinking I was getting a pat on the back. Nope. It was âyou couldâve done betterâ. That was the day I learned to stop trying and just say fuck it at any job since then.
They. Do. Not. Care. So if Iâm going to be treated the same regardless if I put in 110% or 50%, then why bother?
Yup, they think theyâre motivating us but anyone who has worked food service/retail knows that just demoralizes the fuck out of us. Itâs rare enough when a customer actually fills out a slightly positive review, they gotta rip apart even the good ones.
That explains why support agents beg for the highest rating.
Itâs all that BS corpo jargon. âGive 110%â, âDo better than your bestâ. Right, but weâre human beings, no one can be perfect all the time. They donât care, they have you boiled down to a number.
I did retail for 10 years and Iâm damn happy to be done with it. Every time I get a survey though I know in my head what corporate is doing to these people, and I try my damnest to let people know how to actually let their voices be heard.
Leave product reviews, reviews on Google, social media, hell talk to the media, those will all reflect the product itself. But those reviews they send you, those are for human beings just trying to scrape by.
My old job 1-8 was a 0 and 9-10 was passing. Nothing worse than hearing a customer say âI got a survey for you and gave you all 8s because blah blah blahâŚâ. They honestly thought they were doing us a right by giving us 8s.
and corporate knows thatâs how people think and still grade their employees on it because âyou obviously could have done moreâ. I had one that was âWell the only perfect person was Jesus so you canât get a 10/10â. Okay but weâre not grading Jesus here Erma, youâre grading me, and my boss isnât going to listen to that
Thanks for explaining this. Everyone is getting 10s from me from now on.
Exactly my thoughts; what was once envisioned as a personal development or quality/service improvement tool instead becomes a stick with which to beat people.
This practice comes from Japan. In 1980s, certain companies, like Toyota, understood the importance of product and process quality. And one of the practices to ensure that everyone is âon the same groundâ, and that the product under development would surely satisfy the consumerâs needs, was close communication between the stakeholders and receiving the feedback.
Long story short, it was part of their broader âQuality firstâ strategy. However, it is only viable if the organisation is properly managed, and all Quality management things are put into practice (the hardest part).
This is just my understanding from a book I read during my free time. My knowledge may be incorrect.
I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every companyâs data culture is different, so you canât simply say âX is the reason why theyâre doing thisâ. It could be:
What Iâve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And itâs usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going ârightâ.
When I worked in customer service this info was used in performance reviews. Also if I got an outstanding review my boss would give me a gift card or something.
Who wouldnât want a ton of feedback about the service provided?
I wish my costumers provided me with all their genuine feedback, all the things they hate about our app and why. All the things they wish it did but doesnât. All the bugs they have found and never reported. Feedback is such a vital and scarce information
Have you tried spamming their inbox every time they use your app like everyone else?
Itâs a corporate app so itâs harder to reach the actual end user.
At the company I work for we actually make and sell products on Amazon. We ask for reviews for 2 reasons: 1. Star rating = sales. Pretty simple. 2. We compile customer complaints and try to resolve them. Our sales team goes through all of the negative reviews and tells the production team, fix this, and we actually fix it (if possible).
Our company is only about 100-120 people. The CEO/owner actually does work and is involved instead of just watching and looking at numbers so itâs definitely not your typical corporation.
I think in almost all cases it is just used to reward (or more likely) punish employees through pay or continued employment. I donât think they actually care to improve their products, processes, etc.
TLDR if you donât give all 10s the employee gets in trouble and eventually fired, even for things not in their control
They donât deserve my opinion if theyâre that irresponsible with the data. I just stopped doing them when I learned that.
Yeah I never do themâŚmy time is worth something and they arenât paying
I can tell you that at least for stuff I work on, every single comment entered into those little dialogs is read by a human that actually works in a meaningful role on the product.
Comments that curse and complain with no topic in mind are useless, and easily ignored. Take two seconds and tell them exactly what is bothering you and what youâd rather see, and things might actually get better.
Anyone that gives anyone in the service industry less than a 10 on those support/delivery surveys is a cop.
Much of the data collection is to provide data for someoneâs annual review. Reviews are made personal to the front line when itâs actually a corporate failure.
As someone said a very long time ago: if voting could change anything it would be illegal.
In my opinion, it is another way to get value out of the user instead of giving value.
Managers have to do very little work in terms of understanding the skills of their employees if we do it for them.
A huge step I found in terms of my mental health was to refuse to give reviews anymore, in any form. I am now able to enjoy my experiences a lot more without looking for reasons to critique them.
Yep! Itâs free real estate.
This is the thing that most companies seem to obsess over these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
I think itâs just a fad.
NPS is a way for lazy managers to avoid having to actually interact with customers. Thereâs no way one number can encapsulate how a customer feels, but theyâre going to try because itâs easier and cheaper.