In my case, the answer is not bother, but in general if you get a text message from e.g a bank, asking to rate the service you received out of 10, and you just received fine service on a simple transaction, what would you say would be the best answer? 5 because it was just a ho-hum ordinary transaction, nothing special either way, 10 because nothing went wrong, (although that means the theoretical really complicated problem that was handled expertly has no way to go up.), or anything in between? (or lower?!)
Personally if I did reply I’d probably go 10 on the same basis as Ebay’s star system, people have come to expect 5 stars and anything less is effectively a complaint, although that just highlights how ridiculous the text a number by phone customer feedback system is.
I’ve been on the receiving end of these damn things as a CSA for a UK mobile network and you are correct - at least in my experience, anything less than the highest score counts against the adviser/bank teller/whatever. Failing to respond at all doesn’t though - it’s pretty much neutral.
So, if I’m very happy with the service, I’ll respond with the maximum score. If the service was just “meh”, I won’t respond at all. If the service was completely terrible, I’ll respond with anything other than the maximum score.
Whenever possible, I respond to these followup survey nonsense things with something along the lines of “everything was absolutely fine until the company decided to annoy me by sending me these surveys.”
Indeed, my company sends out surveys that score from 1 to 10. Our average response is 9.2 overall, and ANY score on any question below a 7 requires management intervention.
Consequently, anyone who places thought and logic into the survey is screwing me, or whatever rep did the work. Really, I can do a great job but if you consider "“Average” to be 5 and 10 to be “absolutely the best customer service experience that could theoretically have taken place” - which logically is what a 10 has to be - then you might right up a bunch of scores from 6 to 8 and it hurts my average.
But NOT answering doesn’t hurt me at all.
Customer surveys are, in my direct experience and professionally informed and expert opinion, usually terrible.
There is the additional shitty problem with surveys like that, for which reason I ignore them:
On the occasion when I do have any dissatisfaction with the service I got, it’s almost never for a reason that is addressed by the surveys. And even if it is, it’s not always necessarily something that the front-line customer service rep could have done anything about (and I wouldn’t necessarily even know that), yet according to all the stories we read, it’s always the front-line person who gets shit on if the customer isn’t deliriously happy.
I worked in a bank that did this. Put 10 unless they screwed something up. Don’t go with the “7-8 is great, 10 is if they gave me a bj too” mentality. The manager took non 5s (we did 1-5 ratings) seriously and expected a justification for why you didn’t get a perfect score from the 27th customer of the day 4 months ago.
Ignoring is fine as well. As is telling the surveyor how stupid it is, though doubt they’ll listen.
