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Customer Feedback Surveys Could Be Considered Harmful (easydns.org)
Longtime Slashdot reader Stunt Pope writes: Customer Feedback surveys are now near-ubiquitous, subjecting us all to near-Black Mirror-esque pursuit to "rate your experience" for everything from going to the bank to ordering a pizza. Thanks to The Curse of Goodhart's Law, all of these surveys are beyond useless and even damaging. Mark Jeftovic writes in a blog post: "The shop/hire-rate-reward feedback loop has become baked-in to some systems. Many live marketplaces incorporate these feedback transactions into ratings, which then become a score which then impacts future prospects of whomever is being rated. And that's where the trouble starts. There is a point where this stops being useful and the knock-on effects of a ratings system predicated on feedback results becomes counter-productive. That point is when the ratings become targets. When a company decrees 'All customer feedback ratings must score a minimum of X, or else...' the company has just commenced the process of invalidating and corrupting all useful information to be gleaned from that feedback/survey process. A label which captures this concept is 'Goodhart's Law' -- after economist Charles Goodhart, who posited in essence that 'when a measure becomes a target, it becomes useless.'"
I work in the auto industry. Consider all manufacturer surveys on a logarithmic scale. On a 1 through 10 rating system with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, most dealership operators and manufacturers consider 9 a failing grade for the salesperson. Yes, you read that right. A survey filled out with 9's all the way down will get most salespeople called on the carpet. And if you average a 90% rating for the month you may not work there the next month.
Many salespeople's living wage is ties to bonuses that come from customer satisfaction ratings. You get paid one amount for selling a car. You get paid a higher amount if your average customer satisfaction for the month (or sometimes a 3 month rolling average) is above a certain very high number (like 97%.) Some dealerships tie all performance bonuses to high customer satisfaction scores, easily halving the pay of the salesperson if they get one survey with low scores.
For instance, as a salesperson I have had one customer who scored a survey in the 85% range and due to the circumstances of that month, it cost me over $3500 in lost bonuses. This is not an isolated instance. It happens routinely at dealerships all over the country.
The first time I heard from a manufacturer's rep that customer satisfaction ratings are directly related to not only future sales for the marque but also current resale value I knew it was a sham.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
"it cost me over $3500 in lost bonuses."
That's part of the problem. Bonuses, by its very definition, can't be lost, only earned.