Call centers- Who else hates surveys?

[MoonChild2007]

I work at a major cable company and the last thing we do is transfering the customer to the survey which I find stupid. Why should we as reps be judged on some stupid number? The customers who call us are pissed off anyways so why bother transfering them to the survey? Get this, my company uses these scores to judge my performance.

My scores are nothing to write home about and frankly, I do not understand. I am nice and courteous to the customer but some customers have attitudes and want to rate me low. And when my review comes up, I will get a bad review because of these stupid reviews.

Numbers should not judge a person's performance.

[smileyeagle1021]

oh, I agree... one thing I hated at IHG was that your performance review was made up half by your net revenue per call handled. OK, I understand that is important, but in all honesty, NetRevCHa had more to do with luck than skill. If you got a lot of calls for upscale hotels in New York your numbers will be higher, if you keep getting calls however for low end hotels in Detroit, your numbers will be lower. Call flow is completely random based on who's next in line.

[draggar]

My company does worse - after a transaction you're flagged in the system for a follow up call.

The issue is that if they went to multiple stores there is no way of teling which store it is for so someone could get all bad marks - even if the notes say it is for store A, if the call was for store B, store B gets hit with the bad score - even if they comment that store B was the best thing ever.

At least in my job now the system just generates an email and they can click on a link when they want to get to the survey.

[trailerparkmedic]

I used to work at a call center for a company that had people in the US and in India. The biggest complaint from my surveys? That the customer just couldn't understand anyone from India. My "bad scores" kept lowering my raises.

[MoonChild2007]

I need everyone's help. My manager told me if I don't get my scores up in 30 days, they will fire me! How do i get good scores?

Please, no smart answers, my job is on the line!

[Getpowned]

me 2

i 2 work at a major call center for a cable company and i freakin hate surveys and having to kiss azz or get fired A CURSE TO ALL CUSTOMERS WHO LIKE TO GET PEOPLE FIRED!!!! JK

[Broomjockey]

The secret to good scores is simple, but not easy.

Got a script? Recite it to the letter.

Never say "No," or "I can't do that." Be as friendly as possible, even to someone cursing your very existence. Suggest alternatives when it is something you can't do. Use the caller's name at least twice.

Those are the most common things looked for. Anything else is likely specific to your job, and really, your boss should be the one telling you how to raise your scores.

[sld72382]

The problem with surveys our center sends out is that our customers will mark people down if they don't like the answer even if the CSRs followed policy to the letter and were very nice.

It got so bad with low marks that we had to create a retention dept that would call the customer and ask why they gave a bad score. The issue is that sometimes they would have a spine if we were in the right, but other times as soon as the customer spouts "I'm never shopping here again!" the retention dept would sent them a gift card even if the customer was completely wrong.

[MoonChild2007]

But see the problem is, we as reps don't even see our scores until our supervisor shows it to us which is TOTALLY not fair.

your boss should be the one telling you how to raise your scores.

My boss doesn't seem to care.

[Broomjockey]

Any chance there's an HR department that would be willing to give you a hand? I remember someone else on the board managed to get assistance in raising their scores that way when the boss turned out to be a jerk.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

When I worked at a call center, customers were given an automated call back and asked to answer five questions about their experience.

Here's the problem: More than one CSR is often needed to address an issue. So let's say someone calls in with a problem and I explain to them the nature of the problem and what needs to be done to fix it but I need to transfer them to take care of it. If I transfer them and them and the rep that picks up totally fucks things up or does whatever to piss off the customer, I get hit with a bad grade even though I did nothing wrong.

We started off with a system that graded us an 80 point scale, where an 80 was a perfect call. Anything over 60 was considered acceptable. Certain things would result in an automatic zero, such as cursing or hanging up on a customer.

Then a few months before I left they brought in this "all or nothing" system which meant that if you screwed up anything, even the most insignifant of things, you would FAIL the whole call, which was equivalent to getting a 0 under the old system.

Unfortunately MoonChild2007, I don't have much advice for you. If you a piss a customer off royally they aren't going to give you good marks on a survey, even if you did exactly what you should have done.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Want my advice? Try to find a job where surveys don't have the power to get you fired.

Seriously, customer service surveys are about the biggest scam going nowadays. At the swamp, most of the people who take the survey are people wanting to complain about something or someone, so naturally corporate isn't happy and is demanding to know why our survey scores suck so bad. But we've been beating our sales goals pretty much daily for at least the last month, so we have to be doing something right.

Throw in the chance to win a shopping spree if you do the survey, and you're giving the complainers even more incentive to complain.

With those surveys, things are pretty much completely out of your hands. You can be the most syrupy-nice person, and if somebody has a bone to pick with your company that has nothing to do with you, you're still boned. Sorry.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

Want my advice? Try to find a job where surveys don't have the power to get you fired.

Seriously, customer service surveys are about the biggest scam going nowadays. At the swamp, most of the people who take the survey are people wanting to complain about something or someone, so naturally corporate isn't happy and is demanding to know why our survey scores suck so bad. But we've been beating our sales goals pretty much daily for at least the last month, so we have to be doing something right.

Throw in the chance to win a shopping spree if you do the survey, and you're giving the complainers even more incentive to complain.

With those surveys, things are pretty much completely out of your hands. You can be the most syrupy-nice person, and if somebody has a bone to pick with your company that has nothing to do with you, you're still boned. Sorry.

QFT

My company is obsessed with surveys to the point where they bitch us out royally if we don't hit our survey quota for the week. Never mind most customers probably don't want to bother going to a website and filling out a FORTY FIVE question survey.

I wish they'd let me at that thing, I could cut it down to 5 easy questions.

The funny thing to me is that you should be able to judge the quality of your customer service by the number of complaints you get. If you don't get many complaints, you're obviously sending a lot of people away satisfied, so why bother forcing them to take a damned survey to prove it?

[Rapscallion]

The funny thing to me is that you should be able to judge the quality of your customer service by the number of complaints you get. If you don't get many complaints, you're obviously sending a lot of people away satisfied, so why bother forcing them to take a damned survey to prove it?

This is generally true, but it should be noted that if people don't complain to you there's a good chance that they're buggering off elsewhere and ceasing to be repeat customers.

Rapscallion

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Another thing about the surveys at the swamp-grading is on a 5-point scale. 1 is poor, 2 is fair, 3 is good, 4 is very good, and 5 is excellent.

Our survey scores for all the different questions are the percentage of respondents who rated us a 5, I believe. There are probably lots of people who think "Hmm, they were good enough, I got what I wanted and everybody was courteous, but it wasn't quite the best experience I've had in a store, so I'll give them a 4. That's still very good."

Wrong! Not according to corporate it isn't! In corporate's eyes, getting a 4 is the same as getting a 1.

IMO, the surveys could be useful if corporate would focus on trends over a period of time. For example, do people keep complaining about the checkout waits? The cleanliness of the bathrooms? The attitude of the staff? Those might be things to focus on if people keep mentioning them. But that's not what corporate does. They freak out about week-to-week differences in the scores and keep putting the managers on the spot to explain what happened in a particular week to make the scores bad.