Constant bleedin' "Customer Satisfaction surveys"!

[TrueOrFalse]

I was in Wilkinsons yesterday. It was a dull, rainy kind of day. I felt a bit miserable about life. However, the woman at the till was very charming and chatty and helpful. Ah, I thought, all is not lost!

Then, as I went to leave, she thrust into my hand my receipt with a little speech about customer service feedback at the bottom. She took a red pen and underlined her name very assertively! I suppose she wanted me to give her some positive feedback.

So I was left with an uncomfortable feeling. Was she being pleasant because she wanted to? Or is it all part of an Orwellian coercion? Are even a few pleasantries in a shop a means-to-an-end? Its obviously good to get good service and maybe companies are so large now they have no other way to "spy" on their workers to make sure they are doing their jobs. But AIBU to think it leaves you wondering if anyone is genuine...

M&S and lots of shops do this now. I just ignore it. Has anyone ever even won the £250 prize they all offer (every month wow!)?

I’m sick of these too. It seems that every time you do anything the shop/service provider wants you to provide them with feedback. I used to do them but I can’t be bothered anymore, if they want to pay me for my time I’m available at my standard rate.

The thing which really winds me up about the whole customer satisfaction survey thing is that it seems to me an excuse for companies to divert your attention from the fact that they are culling staff who would previously have been employed for this purpose and directing you to websites.

The number 1 reason for poor customer satisfaction, IMHO, is being unable to get through to people on the phone who might be able to help you with your query/complaint. With almost any company over a certain size, if you call up about anything you will be directed via an automated message to "try our website". As if you hadn't already done that. You'll then get asked to participate in a clunky and crude customer satisfaction survey which doesn't allow you to express what your real feedback is.

If you're having to call a company up, it will inevitably be because the website hasn't provided the information you require or allowed you to interact with the company in any meaningful way. Asking you to complete another form about your satisfaction a) won't sort your problem out any quicker b) won't allow you to express exactly what the nature of the problem is and c) will almost certainly be ignored.

Note to all companies of any size. If you really want decent customer satisfaction invest in some decent, English speaking staff who can answer the telephone and have a conversation with you. I guarantee your customer satisfaction will shoot up.

Rant over.

yes its cheeky isn't it?

Yes, it is annoying - plus I get phone calls after I visit my bank or surveys after clicking on a website.
Seriously people - if service is bad I'll complain, if it's fine I'll just go on my way, if it is excellent then I'll recommend to all and sundry. I don't need to have follow up after every transaction in the day.

Even when I receive something in the post I get a "how did we do?" request. You were asked to do one bleeding thing - deliver a letter. You did it. What do you want, a medal?

I just don’t do them. If asked I say that unless I’m being paid I’m not interested.

I recently bought a new car. The salesman was just delightful and then said how I would be sent a customer satisfaction survey and that the expected rating would be 5 stars.

It then all seemed very false.

I was in JD Sports yesterday and on the card reader thing that you pay on, I had to first fill out a customer satisfaction thing via the key pad thing. While the assistant was watching.

I couldn't even read it properly so DD just put something neutral for me.

Only then did I get the card reader symbol thing for contactless pay. Bloody ridiculous.

I never do the surveys. That is what they used to employ mystery shoppers for. As someone up thread said "pay the going rate".

I work in customer service, we have to offer these, we all hate it. And unlike many we're not pushy, we accept no for an answer, we're not targeted on the scores we get (just on numbers completed) and our managers are actually interested in negative feedback as well as positive.

I'm nice to people because I'm a nice person. Often if I've been exceptionally nice, I won't offer it precisely because I don't want the customer to think I was only nice so they'd give me five stars.

If you have spare time, do it. If you don't want to then just say no. Don't try to be funny and ask for payment, don't give long winded excuses, don't lie about there being someone at the door. Just say no.

Its interesting to hear your views that you don't like doing it Glum. I don't think the comments are directed at staff though.

It's annoying. Everyone wants feedback for everything.

And you only need to click on a website for a massive banner to pop up asking you to subscribe to their chuffing newsletter.

If I feel particularly strongly one way or the other I'll do them, but not if it involves having to faff about registering on a website. I recently ordered a gift voucher online, and had an email from the company wanting me to review the voucher. . "Well, it said it was worth £25 and it was, and the card it was in was quite pretty..."

If I do get really good service somewhere, I go to the company website, find the feedback section / Head Office email and tell them about it, because that just feels like a good thing to do.

I work in a shop and we have to get X amount of responses to the survey each week, and the results have to be an average 80% satisfaction or higher for the week.

I find it so uncomfortable mentioning it, because I feel like customers will think I've only been nice to get a good score. I'm always nice! Have worked there over 10 years in various roles and have been nice for all of it, but in the last year or so they've introduced these surveys.

It's frustrating (though understand why customers do it) when we get bad ones because the prices were too expensive or car park charges are high because it knocks down the score and it's not our fault yet head office doesn't bother reading the comments, they just want the good figures.

I think basically customers should know we hate it, but we are forced to mention it and that most of us are nice anyway, not faked for a good result!

I work in a supermarket. We have those tell us how we are doing you can win X. We have targets of 30-40 a month but average 30. My store manager doesn't like pushing it as the more you push the worse response you get. We only suggest when it's quiet.

Yes it's all about targets. The staff hate doing it but they have been told to.

But customers can bin the receipts and not do the surveys, it's not compulsory.

This is a bit different from OP's problem but related. I sell knitting patterns on different sites and the most problematic is Amazon as they are downloads for kindle.

I sell 15-30 each month on average and not many bother to leave feedback but I get mainly 5 stars when they do. However some people have devices that won't download the pattern and that's a problem I cannot remedy. I don't know how to fix it as I upload my pattern as per Amazon's instructions and I test it on my own kindle to make sure it's loading/sized correctly as it's a fiddly business. Can take me days to get one pattern sorted.

But I've had a couple of buyers who leave 1 star with feedback 'never received, not worth the money' or 'not bothered to send me my pattern.'

Straight after these comments my sales take a nosedive. I've asked Amazon how to sort it out and they don't know or care. The feedback cannot be removed as it is part of the buyer's experience and others need to know (according to Amazon).

The buyer is automatically refunded so they are not out of pocket but my sales get affected and people always look at the 1 star.

Sorry to derail OP, maybe I should start my own thread about Amazon as a seller. I think their feedback system is really unfair on sellers at times.

Giles Corey wrote a very amusing article about exactly this. "Stop asking me how I'm feeling every 5 minutes!"
You get asked for reviews about everything nowadays. Even individual items on an online shop. (People have taken the time to review for example a pack of first class stamps on the ocado website, in a tongue in cheek fashion!)

I can’t get het up about the receipt ones or emails, you can easily ignore them and go about your day. The pin pad thing is ridiculous though!

They get printed out where I work, yes people do win the monthly prize, we get details of who they are each month. Yes the staff hate pushing them, if one pops out I just hand it over with the receipt without mentioning it. I will say though, it has been really useful for us, mystery shoppers serve a purpose but it’s once a month, one snapshot in time. We get lots of these filled out online per day (between 10-20 on average for our store.)

It gives us the comments and the time of day plus good bad or indifferent. It helps us to work out what the customers coming into our own store like and don’t like, when service is best and worst and therefore we can work on it, it only works though I feel if they’re read at individual store level and department level like ours. If it’s just read by people in head office it doesn’t really achieve much. There’s no customer info or anything for us to see at store level too just comments/time/departments which is all we need.

I used to work in retail. I hated these bloody surveys!
They'd print out the responses and put them in the break room, with the bad bits highlighted.
We'd lose out to all sorts of silly things, the fact that someone got a ticket in the car park (that wasn't owned by the store) or something was out of stock, or we'd had the audacity to close at closing time.
They were starting to get snotty towards people who didn't get enough responses when I left.
It's stupid. Most staff hate pushing them, most customers hate filling them in. Some people just use them to vent.

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