Customer Surveys? No!

This message is important: Stop filling out customer satisfaction surveys!

You know how you go to a store and they give you the receipt with the number to call or the web site to visit, then they ask you to rate your "experience" at whatever business it was? Or you call your wireless provider and they ask you to stay on the line for a brief survey? They ask you to rate from 1-5 or something on things like, "I felt like the employee cared about me," and other topics under the specious claim of improving their customer service.

Don't fill them out. A lot of places capture your e-mail address specifically to send you these surveys - they don't even care so much about selling your info to spammers any more. Feel free to give them your e-mail address or whatever (more on this later) but don't ever fill the surveys out. Why, you ask?

Customer satisfaction surveys harm the employees, regardless of the type of response, more than they improve anything.

The big companies these days keep a tally of "good" responses, "mediocre" responses and "bad" responses. The "bad" responses, when about an accurately poor experience, will help to some extent (though, if you don't want to be a passive-aggressive ninny you should talk to the manager immediately after the incident). The other responses, though, only serve as fuel to overwork the employees. This is exhibited by the comment, "Other locations in our business get great responses to their customer surveys, so that new policy works," when the employees question why they have to do even more work for the same amount of money in the name of customer service. Have you ever walked into a store and like five employees, who are in the middle of assisting other people, yell out greetings to you? That's a result of the surveys. It's really stupid because they could just hire someone to greet people yet they decided, instead, to stretch the job description of the existing employees. They back that decision up by pointing to their results, even though there is no aggregate link between the two!

There are probably places where the employees are genuinely slacking off but the overwhelming majority of places that I go to or deal with have decent employees who are doing their job. As an example, I had to deal with Charter a while back over the phone and then it directed me to a survey. The questions it asked were things like, "As a result of your call, do you feel like Charter cares about you as a person?" This is a useless question to base staffing or policy decisions upon. I don't give a damn if they care about me as a person, nor should anyone else and nor should they! (This, of course, is indicative of a bigger problem since there are people who care about this kind of asinine rigmarole.)

So all that filling out those surveys does is give corporations ammunition to use against their (mostly) overworked employees. Even worse, some companies give bonuses to managers who get higher scores while the people who earned them get pats on the back. Also disturbing, there are places who get graded on those aforementioned e-mail captures: the employees bear the brunt of people who don't give out their e-mail address so that's why I said it's okay to do that, at least. Again, just don't fill out the surveys.

And yes, I understand this is class warfare. At least I don't mask my dissidence with ostensible claims of a greater good or something - you know, like how the corporations try to say they want to improve your experience when it's really just about some executive being able to buy another Maserati? Actually, I'm honestly pretty tired of being bothered so much by employees at retail stores who are concerned about punishment, too.

Why can't these businesses take a gander at Best Buy? Best Buy clearly couldn't care less about customer surveys because I can walk in there and browse around, unhindered, and make a purchase. If I can't find something, I never have trouble locating an employee to assist me. All of this runs contrary to what I experience elsewhere - whether a physical location I go to or some agent I speak with over the phone. Of course, I hear it's hell to work there, as well. Hmm.