Dear large companies, it’s not my job to make you feel good

Companies have turned into praise-junkies.

Kasey Edwards
September 30, 2019

The Age

Needy, clingy and so insecure that constant reassurance is never enough. No, I’m not talking about that bad relationship. I’m talking about some cutsomer-facing businesses these days.

It’s almost gotten to the point where you can’t buy something without then being asked to provide a rating of a company’s performance on a five-star scale.

I’ve been asked to rate my “store experience” on the EFTPOS terminal before I can pay. Even the most mundane activities, such as calling Telstra or picking up a parcel from Australia Post, is followed by texts or emails with surveys asking “How did we do?”

Online purchases are routinely followed up by a customer satisfaction survey. Companies are so desperate for a hit of stars that if you delete the survey because, you know, you have a life, the company spams you with another survey.

We’re prompted to rate our apps when we’ve barely had a chance to use them. One online course provider I use asks you what you think of the course after you’ve only completed roughly 2 per cent of it.

Economist and author of Incentivology Jason Murphy says that companies use customer satisfaction ratings because the glittering constellations of star feedback have become the nuclear power sources of the modern economy.

“Whole businesses live and die on a metric most of us have never heard of. They call it Voice of Customer and it measures how happy we are with what we’re getting,” says Murphy.

“Incentives for good consumer service are vital. But handing out incentives for great behaviour cannot happen in a vacuum. Companies need to know when good service happened, and to find it, they have to ask us,” he says.

But you can’t help but wonder if these companies are basing their business on a foundation of fabrications. I confess that with online surveys I just click the option that’s closest to my mouse cursor to get the damn thing off my screen. Often the star rating I give has far more to do with the kind of day I’m having than the purchase I just made.

There now exists a whole industry which strategically creates fake ratings to boost a business’s rating — or ruin competitors’ ratings. Trip Adviser recently admitted to having 1.4 million fake reviews and Facebook and eBay were taken to task earlier this year in the UK by the Competition and Markets Authority over their fake and misleading reviews.

Of course, there are times when star ratings are useful. I wouldn’t get into an Uber with a one star rating, for example. Then again, I’ve never seen an Uber with a one star rating, which makes me wonder if, like the children of Lake Wobegon, all Uber drivers are above average.

Jason Murphy says part of the appeal of customer reviews is that it gives a sense to the consumer that what they think counts. “There may be no emotion more human than wanting to believe our opinion matters,” he says.

“This is the lifeblood of the whole survey industry — we all crave the chance to finally say what we really think.”

While I love to share my opinion as much as next person, a recent interaction with a company asking for feedback left me cold.

I was practically begged by a customer service rep in a call centre to stay on the call to answer a quick survey about her performance. The desperation in the poor woman’s voice bothered me. It seemed she was being pressured to persuade me to answer the “quick two question survey” or face a penalty if I didn’t comply.

Out of concern for the customer service rep I stayed on the call rated my “customer satisfaction” as “5 for extremely satisfied”. But, like so many ratings, it was make up. In truth I was “1 for extremely dissatisfied” at having to waste more time feeding the corporate praise addiction