Giving feedback for service.

I was just wondering what employees receive when you give feedback on services. Payrise? Employee of the month? The sack?

I've had 3 recent experiences where I've been contacted afterwards about the service. One was a bank who asked me various questions about the person who served me in branch. The employee told me this would happen so asked me if I thought she'd done well and if so, would I rate her 5 stars when asked. I was a bit cross so ignored the feedback form when it arrived but now feel a bit mean about that. She was nice and helpful but surely just doing her job?

I had another more recent contact with a phone company, the staff member was lovely, really very helpful, gave me lots of additional info and even her personal email (and followed up a couple of days later just to check). I felt she went over and above to resolve things. She didn't ask for 5 stars etc or even mention the feedback form which duly arrived - and I gave her a glowing ref with several lines of additional text.

Then today a lovely but rather patronising young man again told me several times how important customer service was to him with several examples (I only wanted to arrange for something to be fixed!!) and again asked me to give him 5 stars. Haven't had the feedback form yet for him.

So this is obviously really important on an individual level but what do employees actually get from it? And what do you do? Ignore? Give everyone 5 stars? I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings when they are trying to do well but when I worked in retail, we gave our best customer service at all times, without having to think about stars or explain why we were giving good service as if it was unusual.

I'd be interested in others' thoughts

Thanks - EJ
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Comments

  • marliepanda
    marliepanda Posts: 7,186 Forumite
    A lot of people have arbitrary targets based on how many people give feedback. They don't care on a personal level, their boss does.
  • Ilona
    Ilona Posts: 2,449 Forumite
    If I am asked for feedback I never give it, except if I have had appalling service, which very rarely happens.

    If I have had good service I thank the person who gave it to me.

    ilona
    I love skip diving.
    :D
  • isabellac
    isabellac Posts: 33 Forumite
    edited 17 November 2018 at 2:08AM
    As someone who has worked in retail under a customer feedback scheme I feel very qualified to answer your question!

    Please understand that in the vast majority of cases, all the people who are serving you will be doing their utmost to deliver you an excellent level of customer care and would be doing so irrespective of whether you might or might not get a request for feedback from their employer :)

    The reason this feedback is so important to these employees is because of the scale on which it is graded. In most places, scores of 90% and above are deemed as acceptable and satisfactory, and anything below 90% is negative and a detractor from good service. Even if you as a customer write the person a glowing report, if you rate them 8/10 or 4/5 this will still poll as a negative score.

    So to all people out there who are receiving this request from people serving them in stores - please understand the severity of the grading system that we are working under and kindly ignore the message you receive should you feel the person serving you did not warrant your kindness in helping them achieve a good result on one of their personal KPIs despite the ridiculous parameters set by their employer.

    Incidentally, it is also worth mentioning that irrespective of how the feedback questioning is worded, your comment and score is reflective only of how you felt the particular individual who helped you performed. It has zip to do with your opinion of the company/the product you purchased/what happened as a follow up to your sale/the environment of the retail store/what you ate for breakfast.

    Unless you specifically cite something in your message that makes it unquestionably clear that it is not in any way related to the person who helped you that you gave a negative score, then it is 100% likely that they will not even be able to have it removed or overturned. This has happened to me in the past where I gave a customer wonderful service (she said this in the body of the message) but she was disappointed with the store environment and thus gave an 8, despite the lack of seating in store being entirely outside of my control and thus rendering all my 10/10 scores basically void. Sadly the scoring is heavily weighted towards the negative, such that one detractor score can bring a 100% score with many responses down by a huge amount - I'm not sure what the maths is on it but it's insane, once a single 8 dropped my 100% average to 67.5%.

    So to answer your question about what actually happens with these scores - it could be any of the following:

    - should you perform well enough under these mad parameters and score lots of 10/10s, you may receive a small performance related bonus (although this is likely tied in with many other targets and thus probably unachievable)

    - if you receive any negative/detractor comments whatsoever, you will bring your entire team/store's overall score down and be reprimanded... not to mention that it is very unlikely that you will be able to claw yourself back to the required company target score (likely something ridiculous like 95%) as the positive comments you receive beyond that point will not carry enough weight to fix the issue unless you somehow manage to garner literal hundreds of positive replies.

    Sorry for the lengthy post but I hope this clears things up! I am lucky in a sense that where I've worked it's been clear that I personally am responsible for the service and so can feel confident in asking people to give me feedback... But what about those people working in call centres/on live chat services where the feedback request messages are even more dubious about what they're actually asking? The likelihood is the specific person you spoke to will get some kind of repercussion based on the score you give even if it's not made clear by the feedback questions. If I felt the person was helpful I now invariably give a 9 or 10 knowing how the system works.
  • neilmcl
    neilmcl Posts: 19,460
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    So in other words, if you get 100% feedback scores then you may get a bonus at some point, anything less and nothing actually happens other than a potential lecture from the bosses how you could all do better. Isn't that how it should be.
  • Sadly it's not that cut and dry. I mentioned the possibility of a bonus for the sake of transparency, but employees rarely ever see any of it as they have to meet numerous targets in order to receive even a small proportion of it. The feedback metric is used as a way of measuring performance, so if you do not deliver the expected feedback scores from your customer interactions it is likely that you will face repercussions that could eventually lead to a dismissal.
  • hollydays
    hollydays Posts: 19,812
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    isabellac wrote: »
    Sadly it's not that cut and dry. I mentioned the possibility of a bonus for the sake of transparency, but employees rarely ever see any of it as they have to meet numerous targets in order to receive even a small proportion of it. The feedback metric is used as a way of measuring performance, so if you do not deliver the expected feedback scores from your customer interactions it is likely that you will face repercussions that could eventually lead to a dismissal.

    I'm not in a position to disagree with you, but I know in some businesses it's used as a tool to improve management.
  • elljay
    elljay Posts: 1,010
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    Thank you, especially isabellac, for explaining how it works. In fact the 'patronising young man' did go to some lengths to explain that I would be scoring my communication with him at this particular transaction, rather than my feelings about the company as a whole and I'm glad I know about that as I'm sure in the past I've scored on the service in general - depending on the questions asked obviously. I wish that was clearer in the feedback form.

    I shall think more carefully about how I respond in future. I like to give positive feedback if I can and like Ilona, rarely have bad service. Though I do think that can depend on the customer's attitude too - I have a friend who expends so much energy ranting, from banks, to her house vendor, to someone selling God in the street. If she was a bit kinder and more conciliatory I'm sure she'd receive better service too, it's hardly ever the front line staff's fault when things go wrong and they deserve to be encouraged - it's tough enough at the coalface!

    EJ
  • jb66
    jb66 Posts: 1,705
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    Ilona wrote: »
    If I am asked for feedback I never give it, except if I have had appalling service, which very rarely happens.

    If I have had good service I thank the person who gave it to me.

    ilona

    The persons manager will never know about the good service you received.
  • lincroft1710
    lincroft1710 Posts: 17,543
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    A few years ago I spoke to an investment consultant at my bank who basically couldn't (not wouldn't) help me with my query. She told me that if I had a feedback form from our interview, she would like to see "10s".

    Fortunately for her I was not contacted for feedback as she would have been getting 7s or 8s at best.
    If you are querying your Council Tax band would you please state whether you are in England, Scotland or Wales
  • Pound
    Pound Posts: 2,784
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    In a previous retail job I temporarily for a few days worked in the department and happened to read by chance a letter from a customer saying they had received good service specifically from myself. It was nice to read, I put it back in the pile though for someone else to deal with. I never heard anything about it after then and had I not read it by chance, I wouldn't have known about it. Probably the customer would have received a boilerplate letter saying their feedback would have been passed on to my manager.
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