After interacting with a business, I often get an online customer satisfaction survey. Sometimes I do them, sometimes I don’t. Often, I’ll be told ahead of time by the person providing the service to expect the survey. And sometimes this person will suggest that, if I liked the service, I should give the highest rating to every question. It is implied (or stated) that unless they get a perfect score, they will be dinged by management. For example, a local auto dealership told me “we either get A+ or F”.
Now, there are two possibilities here, and neither of them are good.
- The employees are telling the truth. Their management considers anything less than a perfect score to be a failure.
- The employees are fibbing, in an attempt to get a better evaluation of their performance.
If it’s #1, then management is clueless, for two reasons. First, it is foolish to not distinguish between nearly-perfect and total-failure. They’re basically throwing away a lot of useful detail by effectively rounding every score to 10 or 0. Second, by demanding perfection, they are incentivizing their employees to game the system.
In either case, the results of the survey are now suspect. Some percentage of respondents will heed the employee’s suggestion and give inaccurate responses. When “8s” get rounded up to “10s”, companies miss areas that they do pretty well in but could still do with some improvement.
What’s the solution? Well, if a company is doing #1, stop doing it. That’s an easy first step. But in either case, don’t use the results of these surveys to judge individual employees; only use them to look for general trends. Then there’ll be less incentive for employees to nudge the results.
I know, fat chance of that happening…
