1y ago

What's with the corporate obsession with customer feedback?

If you contact the customer support of your utility company, phone carrier, bank, or other service provider you'll likely be flooded with requests to rate the experience and provide feedback. Likewise, corporate websites and email communications often solicit feedback via embedded buttons or links to online forms.

What's with this corporate obsession with customer feedback?

Are these huge piles of feedback actually analyzed and acted upon? Is customer feedback some sort of corporate cargo cult? Or maybe clever marketing by vendors of feedback tools and services?

The impression is the feedback is just discarded or ignored.

38 comments

Gotta have metrics by which to deny employee raises. 😔
- Yup. This all boils down to NPS.
  NPS is that 1-10 star system they use. No matter what you think it means, like 5 being average or 8 being good, it doesn't matter. NPS and companies use it as:
  1-6 - "Detractor" - the employee was absolute shit and should be reprimanded
  7-8 - "Passive" - the employee did not go above and beyond
  9-10 - "Promoter" - the employee did okay
  Raises are usually 3-5% only if your NPS average is above 9.
  That is it, it does not mean what you think it means, that is how corporate views it. 10/10 does not mean they went above and beyond and I had the best experience, because to corporate 10/10 "iS HoW EvErY cUsToMeR ShOuLd fEeL" even though we all know that's impossible. If it's not 10/10 then they did a shit job.
  Also note NPS does NOT mean if your issue was solved or how the company is doing. It is purely how you rate that specific human being. Anything against the company the managers will put directly on that person's head. Literal conversation with my manager went "but they're just mad that they didn't get free product", "well you should have turned that around to make it a 10/10 experience"
  For example, if you call Comcast because they added a new fee to your account and you get "Terry" on the phone, she'll probably tell you there is nothing she can do (because they give her zero power to do anything about it) and that she's sorry for the experience. This is probably her job, to talk to angry customers, her job is to soothe you over, not to give away money. So you get the survey after the fact and you give them all 1/10 stars because you're mad at Comcast, and rightfully so. Except you weren't rating Comcast, you were rating Terry, and that will come up on her review that she didn't perform her job well enough because you were still angry. Terry won't be getting a raise this year, and you'll still have your fees.
  Example 2, you go into Best Buy and you are just looking for a simple cable, say a phone charger or something. "Paul" comes over and you're like "Oh I just need a USB-C charger" and he's like sure thing, right here, and you're like great! He helps you check out even. Best Buy sends a survey and you're like eh what the hell, 7/10, it was a pretty good experience. Wrong, Paul is talked to by his manager in his review on "Why didn't this customer leave feeling like a 10/10?", "Paul, we need to talk to you about why you aren't meeting our customer satisfaction targets."
  Oh and the comments? No one who can do anything will read them. They'll only be used come review time, and positive ones will be skimmed while negative ones will be picked apart.
  Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk and reading this far. tldr - those surveys are more nefarious than you think, and corporate big wigs think they have all of us summed up in a 10 star system.
  
  That explains why support agents beg for the highest rating.
  
  At one of my old jobs I remember getting a 9.2 out of 10 on a performance report. When they called me in for a meeting I was thinking I was getting a pat on the back. Nope. It was "you could've done better". That was the day I learned to stop trying and just say fuck it at any job since then.
  They. Do. Not. Care. So if I'm going to be treated the same regardless if I put in 110% or 50%, then why bother?
  
  My old job 1-8 was a 0 and 9-10 was passing. Nothing worse than hearing a customer say ‘I got a survey for you and gave you all 8s because blah blah blah…’. They honestly thought they were doing us a right by giving us 8s.
  
  Thanks for explaining this. Everyone is getting 10s from me from now on.
- Exactly my thoughts; what was once envisioned as a personal development or quality improvement tool instead becomes a stick to beat people with.

I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company's data culture is different, so you can't simply say "X is the reason why they're doing this". It could be:
Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be "data-driven", so a feedback system was set up, but now it's basically ignored now that they haven't been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it's more effort to remove than just leave in place.
Maybe it's used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don't like
What I've found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it's usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going "right".

This practice comes from Japan. In 1980s, certain companies, like Toyota, understood the importance of product and process quality. And one of the practices to ensure that everyone is 'on the same ground', and that the product under development would surely satisfy the consumer's needs, was close communication between the stakeholders and receiving the feedback.
Long story short, it was part of their broader 'Quality first' strategy. However, it is only viable if the organisation is properly managed, and all Quality management things are put into practice (the hardest part).
This is just my understanding from a book I read during my free time. My knowledge may be incorrect.

When I worked in customer service this info was used in performance reviews. Also if I got an outstanding review my boss would give me a gift card or something.

Who wouldn't want a ton of feedback about the service provided?
I wish my costumers provided me with all their genuine feedback, all the things they hate about our app and why. All the things they wish it did but doesn't. All the bugs they have found and never reported. Feedback is such a vital and scarce information
- Have you tried spamming their inbox every time they use your app like everyone else?
  
  It's a corporate app so it's harder to reach the actual end user.

I think in almost all cases it is just used to reward (or more likely) punish employees through pay or continued employment. I don’t think they actually care to improve their products, processes, etc.
TLDR if you don’t give all 10s the employee gets in trouble and eventually fired, even for things not in their control
- They don't deserve my opinion if they're that irresponsible with the data. I just stopped doing them when I learned that.
  
  Yeah I never do them..my time is worth something and they aren’t paying

I can tell you that at least for stuff I work on, every single comment entered into those little dialogs is read by a human that actually works in a meaningful role on the product.
Comments that curse and complain with no topic in mind are useless, and easily ignored. Take two seconds and tell them exactly what is bothering you and what you’d rather see, and things might actually get better.
Anyone that gives anyone in the service industry less than a 10 on those support/delivery surveys is a cop.

Much of the data collection is to provide data for someone's annual review. Reviews are made personal to the front line when it's actually a corporate failure.
As someone said a very long time ago: if voting could change anything it would be illegal.

In my opinion, it is another way to get value out of the user instead of giving value.
Managers have to do very little work in terms of understanding the skills of their employees if we do it for them.
A huge step I found in terms of my mental health was to refuse to give reviews anymore, in any form. I am now able to enjoy my experiences a lot more without looking for reasons to critique them.
- Yep! It's free real estate.

At the company I work for we actually make and sell products on Amazon. We ask for reviews for 2 reasons: 1. Star rating = sales. Pretty simple. 2. We compile customer complaints and try to resolve them. Our sales team goes through all of the negative reviews and tells the production team, fix this, and we actually fix it (if possible).
Our company is only about 100-120 people. The CEO/owner actually does work and is involved instead of just watching and looking at numbers so it's definitely not your typical corporation.

Are these huge piles of feedback actually analyzed and acted upon? Is customer feedback some sort of corporate cargo cult? Or maybe clever marketing by vendors of feedback tools and services?
Probably all three depending on the organisation. In theory you want customers and if you can make them happier in an easy way you should do it to retain them and recruit more. In practice, a lot of managers seem to do cargo cult stuff copying other better managers.
I imagine if they have a lot of data they're processing it further, finding trends, and then just pulling samples for a detailed look.

This is the thing that most companies seem to obsess over these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
I think it's just a fad.
- NPS is a way for lazy managers to avoid having to actually interact with customers. There's no way one number can encapsulate how a customer feels, but they're going to try because it's easier and cheaper.

Either marketing itself, i.e. make the company seem more approachable by openly asking for feedback, but then mostly ignoring it. Or genuine attempt at optimising their process to improve customer satisfaction.

Feedback on what works lets businesses allocate resources to things that will get new/keep current customers and save in places that don't matter as much. It's the core principle of any business and everything else, while useful and important in its own way, is secondary.
Now whether or not it feels like businesses are acting on that feedback in a way that makes a difference is a whole other beast.

38 comments