Customer Service Surveys (phone)

In My Humble Opinion
1

It’s very common, when calling customer service, for the automated process to ask you to remain on the line after the call for a survey on how satisfied you were with the customer service. I almost never accept this. Besides for the fact that I generally feel like I’ve wasted enough time clicking through the automated process to get a person (plus waiting on hold) I’m also unsure of what these surveys are measuring.

Suppose the person was very professional and curteous but informed me that due to the idiotic process that the company uses, they can’t help me with what I consider a very reasonable request. Am I satisfied or not? Well, I’m happy that this person was efficient and polite, and I certainly don’t want company processes which are completely beyond their control to reflect negatively on them, but I’m not at all happy with the way my issue was “resolved”. So which one is being measured?

Similarly, suppose the customer service rep assures me that they can and will resolve my issue and not to worry about it, it’s all being taken care of, but due to my extensive experience with this company I have substantial reason to doubt that this will actually happen. Was my issue “resolved”? Well, if they do what the rep says they will do, then yes, but if it’s like the last 3 times they told me they would take care of it and didn’t follow through, then no. So who knows?

2

I had a brief, dark chapter in my life where I was on the other end of those phone lines. I’ll spare you the gruesome details.

The upshot of it all is that the the telephone agent’s pay raises are determined in part by the customer satisfaction scores, and in part by how quickly they can get you off the line.

If you think the customer support agent did as well as they could, rate them as highly as you can. Often anything short of perfection is a disaster. You are literally influencing their paycheques. The odds are very high this agent put in a request to get your problem resolved, which gets handled by other departments or, if you’re really unlucky, outside contractors. There’s no telling what will happen. It’s a demonstration of what happens when you go for the lowest bidder.

If you don’t like the company’s policies, complaining to the company itself may get better results, but that’s better only in the sense that 0.1% is better than 0%. A couple hashtag-that-company-sucks posts on Twitter will get better dividends, as those companies hate public attention drawn to their failings in the way that vampires hate sunlight.

3

This!!! It’s been over ten years and I still have nightmares. Anything less than perfection likely means a nasty one on one with a manger. And when a manger had to take time away from important manger things like planning his vacation, the representative isn’t going to enjoy the talk.

4

Just to reinforce what we’re talking about:

My specific job was Tier 2 technical support for a certain, US brand of discount ISP. When people had technical problems with their connectivity of any sort, they were sent to me.

One fellow called because he had a virus on his computer. It’s not my problem to resolve, my responsibilities began and ended with his connection to his modem, and his modem to the ISP.

His approach to his virus problem was very, very wrong, and only made things worse (Windows rollbacks instead of clean reinstalls, if you care), but every time he did this he had to reconnect to the ISP and needed our help. And, this time, he was going make his virus problem my problem to deal with.

I told him it wasn’t my responsibility, but if he wouldn’t accept it, I couldn’t just hang up. I could not give him instructions, because if things broke further, it opened the ISP up to lawsuits. So all I could do was laboriously, tediously instruct him on the difference between rollbacks and Windows reinstalls, and any request for specific instructions was met with, “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to tell you.”

Eventually, he got the point, and he hung up the phone. Sevreral seconds after the hangup click, I let out an exasperated, drawn-out cuss, a five-second F-bomb that never hit the figurative ground. Nobody would hear this.

Seconds later, my manager was summoning me and playing back the recording, and used it as an excuse to dock my pay.

So! My conclusion to everybody else reading this thread: by default, treat telephone people who work at legitimate businesses nicely. They are fed shit sandwiches on a regular basis, and all the stupidity of their job is very much not their fault.