I'm dissatisified with customer satisfaction surveys

[yesthattom]

Q: Why do companies strive for growth rather than technical excellence?

A: Maybe because you can’t measure technical excellence.

Q: Why do companies strive for growth rather than maximizing customer satisfaction?

A: Maybe because its easier to measure growth.

Q: Can’t you measure customer satisfaction?

A: I dunno. Fill out this survey and I’ll summarize the results.

The myth of customer satisfaction surveys is that they are meaningful. Only people with nothing better to do answer surveys. [Major network vendor who’s name begins with “C”] sends me a customer satisfaction survey after every interaction I have with them. What loser network engineer has time to fill out a survey? Real network engineers are off to the next task before the survey arrives in their email. When I was a newbie network jockey kid I filled out every survey I received. One sign of growing up into adulthood is you stop filling our customer satisfaction surveys.

There’s another group of people that answer surveys: people that just got “very bad” service and want to complain. If your service was only “slightly bad,” chances are you won’t fill out the survey, you aren’t angry enough to spend the time. Ironically “very bad” service is usually reported but generally can’t be fixed because the problem is systemic. “Slightly bad” never gets reported but that’s the kind of thing that management can actually fix!

Statistic: Typically 1% of all customer satisfaction survey’s are returned. 10% is considered “excellent” in Quality circles. Does that mean you should decrease the age of your customer base or increase the number of “very bad” service interactions? Beat me.

If you really want to measure customer satisfaction visit my office and talk with me. If you can’t do that, then when I resolve a ticket immediately bring up a window that depicts a smily face :-), a neutral face :-|, and a frowny face :-( and ask, “How did we do?”. I’ll click on the face that’s appropriate. That’s all the time I have to help you figure out why your company is so messed up. Oh, please make sure I get this pop-up right as I’m resolving the ticket, not three minutes later in my email... I’ll have already moved on to my next task. If you do this you’ll get 90% return rate because you’ve made it easy. If your management doesn’t buy this idea, add a mechanism for me to give more details, like a checkbox (default “unchecked”) for “I’ll like to give more input.”

Comments

A few more points

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

Once I filled out a survey and said I was dissatisfied with a support call. I then got a call from the boss of the engineer wondering what went wrong, asking all sorts of details I didn't remember. It was almost as if they were looking for a reason to fire the engineer, who wasn't that bad, but still.

I also like the times (I've seen this in hospitals and for appliance delivery) where you get handed a flyer that basically says "Please give us the highest rating because if you don't we'll get all sorts of questions so if we were good but not great please rank us great anyway." I think supervisors who expect excellence all the time, like some sort of Lake Wobegon on speed, are contributing to "grade inflation" in customer satisfaction surveys. Which by the way I fill out on a wicked bell curve.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I've also filled out surveys when I've gotten especially excellent service. When my leg was broken, for example, several shops and restaurants where I got unexpected assistance received surveys.

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

Most companies focus on growth over quality because the assumption in large scale markets is that quantity can always make up for quantity, and that the cost difference necessary to make a profit can always be made by shipping jobs overseas. Quality is always second because in this market model, a certain amount of churn is built into the model. Companies assume that some customers will be lost, and some will be stolen from the competition each quarter/year. And I think they have a lot of ways to measure customer satisfaction besides just surveys, and they do really scary things with statistics these days. And I think that a lot of spyware is from companies trying to get real info for customer satisfaction data based on what they do rather than what they say.

Which really comes down to not trusting what they say, but seeing what they do. That is the attitude I take in all business and political endeavors.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Sun does that all the time, too. I think they're trying to get more positive feedback. I mean, we'll make time to complain if the service is bad, but when do engineers take time to thank people?

[wayward-va.livejournal.com]

Q: Why do companies strive for growth rather than technical excellence?


Companies strive for more money and this comes from growth. Sometimes you'll have management with the rare insight that more money can come from achieving technical excellence, but they usually have higher than average SG&A and have difficulty lowering it because they have a small cadre of excellent people instead of a large 'critical mass of mediocrity' that can be trimmed or expanded as needed.

Gee, wayward, jaded much?:)

-----wayward

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't believe those surveys. Especially if they're J. D. Power & associates.
What I do if I'm curious about a company is call two numbers. Customer service and billing.
Amazing what a "due to unexpected call volume, you'll be on hold for 20 minutes" recording
will do to my buying patterns. One company's sales department couldn't be
bothered to return my call. Of course, now they've been bought by SPRint, which is an
automatic disqualification anyway.