Rob Nichols

Working in a support organisation I know how important collecting accurate customer feedback is to help enhance business practices or fix issues which maybe leading to dissatisfied customers.

So I was surprised to feel coerced into giving high feedback scores twice in the last two days !

Firstly my car went in for a service and I was told that I’d get a survey afterwards if I’d like to fill it in. This is standard practice, and I encourage my teams to remind customers of this. However the next sentence was something I hadn’t heard before.

“Only 10 is taken as good, anything lower is seen as bad”

I have no idea how the company deals with the survey results, I’d be surprised if that was the case. But the way the agent was confirming that I had good service was telling me I should rate then 10.

Moving on to today, I had an engineer from my broadband provider come to fix my connection, which he did a good job of. As expected before he left he told me I’d receive a survey email about him.

He then showed me a laminated copy of the survey that highlighted 9 of 10 were good and anything else was bad.

This again was a direct ask to give him the highest scores.

I understand from their point that they want to ensure the get rated well as it could effect their bonus or even employment.

However from the business side, this coercion could give a false impression of the true experience of the customer. Great if you want to boast about customer satisfaction, but not good if you want to fix issues and avoid curn.

The latter is more important in the long term.

I have yet to receive either survey…..