If one more company asks me for feedback I just might lose it

 

My partner is always annoyed when people fish for compliments. He says “If you impress people, they’ll tell you. You don’t have to ask.” Likewise, when I call someone to place an order or file a complaint, I let them know if they’ve met my needs. And if they do, I thank them. So why does every single interaction by phone or online result in a request to fill out a friggin’ survey?

Every call is recorded anyway. Presumably, someone listens to those calls to ensure a level of competence and appropriate conduct on the part of the representative. Why can’t they use those calls to figure out if their customers are satisfied without asking us to complete an assignment?

It would be one thing if the surveys were helpful. But none of them have a rating for being overly obsequious or assuming I’m either married or single. Nor do they offer options like “the rep was nice but your product sucks.”

In other words, the surveys are not designed to make the service better. Rather they appear to be designed to make the company feel better by providing a largely useless data point. Additionally, most focus solely on the helpfulness of the customer service person who answered the call, which is only half of the equation given that the issue that prompted the call has nothing to do with the representative.

If they really want to know how happy we are, they should listen to the phone calls and hear how often we need to repeat ourselves; how common it is for the representative to apologize repeatedly; and tell us over and over how they’ll provide us with “excellent service” while failing to address the specifics of our concerns, or worse, transferring us to the wrong department.

I blame Facebook. The “like” button has morphed into a social construct we can’t seem to escape, even if we don’t use Facebook. It is no longer possible to do anything without somebody expecting you to rate the  experience.

If they don’t get the survey on the phone, they’ll send an email. What often appears to be a single question “Did we meet your needs?” turns into a ten-page Q & A once you naively press the “submit” button, assuming you’ve completed the task. Who has that kind of time? And even if we did, why should a customer be asked to spend their time providing feedback to a company that presumably already screwed up—why else would you be calling customer service in the first place?

If companies really care about the customer experience, they should stop wasting our time. Instead, they should play back the customer service calls and listen to them. It’s pretty easy to tell when a customer is frustrated, angry or unhappy.

These phone calls are an unexplored gold mine for improving customer satisfaction. Not only would they discover why the customer called, they would find out exactly what the customer wanted the company to do about it.

If they want to know how their customers feel about the person who answered the phone, listen to their tone and notice if they say “thank you” and if they sound like they mean it. It’s not that hard. They will never get the same valuable information from a one-size-fits-all survey.

Here’s an idea, let’s boycott surveys and force companies to do their own customer service research. In the end they’ll get more valuable data, which will ultimately both improve the customer experience and save us time. I’d call that a win/win.