Surveys (a short rant)

[Racket_Man]

this really should go in MIM but it is more of a general rant. this has been bitched about almost as much as SCs

WHat in the hell is it with companies pushing customer satisfaction surveys????? and WHY OH GOD WHY must every survey be a perfect score??????

Yes I know they offer the customer "incentives" like a cash prize or say an Ipod or free stuff, but why does everything have to be "perfect" like a 5 out of 5 on everysingle question????? nothing can be perfect each and every time and for every customer.

I have read 2 surveys done on the same night (same nights business a couple of hours apart) one with only 2s and 3s and one with all 5s

the one with 2s and 3s basically said our store (almost band new) was a dump (we need a new store), the lot was full of trash, the staff sucked and was "unprofessional", the service was horrible, and the food was puke worthy. and yet these people say they will DEFINEATELY come back.

the one with all 5s said just the oppsite, the atmosphere and appearence was great, the staff was fantastic, the food was great, etc.

WTF??????

Plus we are not allowed to prove that all of the negatives are wrong.


all it seems to be is that the company is wanting is to pat itself on the back and have another swig of their martini whilst find new ways of crapping on and putting down the groundpounders who actually make the company run.

my company is real really really pushing these surveys to the point of nausea. and IF we do not get all perfect scores we get crapped on. there is no real insentive for us as groundpounders to do well except MAYBE a small prize (OHHHHH look a personal pizza WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW) or a $10 gift card for some store.

I just do not get it.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

They probably just want "proof" that your store sucks and needs to be micromanaged even more, but are too cheap to hire secret shoppers.

[Bob The Random Boy Wonder]

WHat in the hell is it with companies pushing customer satisfaction surveys????? and WHY OH GOD WHY must every survey be a perfect score??????

<Former employer> used to do this. This is basically how it worked for us. Corporate used the survey results to gauge how much quarterly incentive that everyone in our store received. Mostly, though, it was just a tool used for bragging rights between stores in the market. Having been told by several managers that corporate only looked at the store averages and not the individual written responses that some customers used to point out actual problems with the store, I believe that story checks out.

Finally, if you do go through and give straight 1's and are asked to put in your contact information so the store can get details about what happened, you will probably never be contacted.

IMHO, store surveys are useless to both the customer and the store. If they'd actually hire some managers that knew what they were doing, they could handle the problems the right way--you know, face-to-face in the store instead of relegating your customers to fill out the online survey that (in my experience) will never be read by anyone who is qualified to take care of any problem that arises.

[SG15Z]

Yeah Kroger has surveys at the bottom of all reciepts now, and every comment is either "OMG THIS STORE IS AWESOME!!1!1!" or "This store is disgusting, the layout sucks, the employees suck, etc. etc." Their's not really any middle ground (for the most part).

All I can think of though is "If the store sucks so much 'ever time' then why do you keep coming back? We have like 3 other grocery stores down the road you can go to."

[JLG]

My store does this too and we usually hear the latest results in our Monday meetings.

If we don't get all 5's in every section it counts as a bad survey.

So lets say that the customer gave us all 5's but not at speed of checkout because the line was to long and we had all regiters open but they give us a 4. That would count as a bad survey score. Even if the customer said something like "Great store I love it but the line was a little to long on this busy Saturday afteroon."

[Geek King]

Expecting surveys to always be perfect is a good way for a store to shoot themselves in the foot. The employees will quickly realize that succeeding is impossible. Once they do, the Employees will stop working as hard, since they're just going to fail anyway. This quickly leads to worse performance than before the surveys started, and poisons the employee's minds toward management, no matter what improvements they make, untill those employees all leave.