If you contact the customer support of your utility company, phone carrier, bank, or other service provider you’ll 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.
What’s 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.
I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:
- Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
- Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
- Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
- Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like
What I’ve 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 it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.
Gotta have metrics by which to deny employee raises. 😔
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 doesn’t matter. NPS and companies use it as:
- 1-6 - “Detractor” - the employee was absolute shit and should be reprimanded
- 7-8 - “Passive” - the employee did not go above and beyond
- 9-10 - “Promoter” - the employee did okay
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 “iS HoW EvErY cUsToMeR ShOuLd fEeL” even though we all know that’s impossible. If it’s 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 person’s head. Literal conversation with my manager went “but they’re just mad that they didn’t get free product”, “well you should have turned that around to make it a 10/10 experience”
For example, if you call Comcast because they added a new fee to your account and you get “Terry” on the phone, she’ll probably tell you there is nothing she can do (because they give her zero power to do anything about it) and that she’s 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 you’re mad at Comcast, and rightfully so. Except you weren’t rating Comcast, you were rating Terry, and that will come up on her review that she didn’t perform her job well enough because you were still angry. Terry won’t be getting a raise this year, and you’ll 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. “Paul” comes over and you’re like “Oh I just need a USB-C charger” and he’s like sure thing, right here, and you’re like great! He helps you check out even. Best Buy sends a survey and you’re 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 “Why didn’t this customer leave feeling like a 10/10?”, “Paul, we need to talk to you about why you aren’t meeting our customer satisfaction targets.”
Oh and the comments? No one who can do anything will read them. They’ll 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.
That explains why support agents beg for the highest rating.
It’s all that BS corpo jargon. “Give 110%”, “Do better than your best”. Right, but we’re human beings, no one can be perfect all the time. They don’t care, they have you boiled down to a number.
I did retail for 10 years and I’m 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.
I think in almost all cases it is just used to reward (or more likely) punish employees through pay or continued employment. I don’t think they actually care to improve their products, processes, etc.
TLDR if you don’t give all 10s the employee gets in trouble and eventually fired, even for things not in their control
They don’t deserve my opinion if they’re that irresponsible with the data. I just stopped doing them when I learned that.
Yeah I never do them…my time is worth something and they aren’t paying
