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.'"

Comments

Purposefully False Feedback

[rtb61]

Due to the growing abusiveness or corporations, invasions of privacy, and wide spread deceit, I have decided to follow the principles that many corporations expose and purposefully lie in feedback to companies I dislike. They want quality consulting services, well, the fuckers can bloody well pay for them, nothing is for free according to them, for free, they just get lies. Turnabout is fair play after all, lie to me, well I'll lie to you ;) (only for poorly behaved corporations, which seems to be the majority, especially multi-nationals).

Re:I've seen it in action

[nine-times]

Another aspect of this that's weird to me:

I was sent a survey to rate a business I frequent-- not to be posted online, just as feedback to the owner. I was asked to rate my experience on a scale of 1 to 10. If I selected 10, it asked the question, "What did you like about your experience?" I selected 8, and the question automatically changed to "What did we do wrong?"

I didn't think they did anything wrong, but to me, the service warranted an 8. To me, 8 is good, just not quite excellent. So I answered the question, "It's not that you did anything wrong. I liked [a bunch of stuff]. In my opinion, you could improve by [doing some things]." I thought it was a very fair review, and I tried to give constructive feedback. I few days later, I got a phone call from the owner to apologize. It wasn't quite annoying, but it definitely seemed unnecessary and awkward, but I said thank you and reiterated that I thought the service was good, and I didn't intend the rating of 8 as a complaint.

Since then, the business has continued to send me requests for feedback. My overwhelming feeling is not wanting to go through that experience, so I either just rate them a 10, or I ignore the survey entirely.