Saturday, January 5, 2008

Over Researched

Have been having a few problems with my Internet connection recently - it keeps cutting out and going slow.

Through all of this I have made multiple calls to the cable company (Cablevision). Overall, they have been pretty good but one major annoyance is their invasive customer satisfaction research.

After each call with a rep. they ask me to take a survey. Not after a set period of time, not randomly, not even after every second call. After EVERY call. This gets very annoying.

The decision to do this was based on an average number of surveys needed per rep. to assess performance. To hit this number, it turned out they needed to survey everyone. IN ADDITION, if you don't take the survey they call the next day and ask you to take it, again. Ugh.

When your customer satisfaction survey starts pissing off customers you have a problem.

It's an easy one to fix. It's even easier not to make the mistake in the first place.

PS: HSBC sent me a survey about their online banking system the other day. It was the first one they have ever sent me and I was happy to fill it out.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This post reminds me of a survey with Comcast. I had a horrible experience and let them know it when I got the phone survey a few weeks later. What really irked me was when I told them it was going to be a bad review; they stopped the survey and thanked me for my time. Obviously they weren't going to get a positive review and figured to move on to someone that would. Their customer service is terrible. Want to see for yourself, call 1-888-COMCAST. The first thing you hear is press 1 for English... Maybe they should start with press 1 if you really wanted to call Comcast. I must have gotten 5-6 more Comcast surveys and told them I wasn't going to waste my time.

I can't imagine taking a survey after each call. It seems they have their performance measures backwards. If they motivate the Reps based on number of surverys, they are going to try every time.

My tip, keep the surveys SHORT. Don't tell me it will be 2 minutes and 20 questions later 15 minutes have gone by...

I feel better now, thanks Paul!

Paul Soldera said...

Glad I can help you vent!

But yeah, it's frustrating isn't it. Part of it is that it is simply easy and cheap to do these interviews these days.

Definitely a case where less is more.

Anonymous said...

Hilarious contradiction. I have Cablevision as well and went through the same inanity when dealing with HD problems. Seems to speak to the "commodity over quality" trend in MR.