I just want to echo Josh’s sentiment:
In a way, it’s hard to blame companies because they honestly want to know and, in the best-case scenario, actually use what they get to make things better.
But it’s oh-so-overwhelming. Just constantly about every single little thing.
One of my favorites is when you log into hotel wi-fi (like 8 seconds after getting into your room) and they ask you how your stay is going. The first 8 seconds have been great, thanks Hilton.
It ruins it for everybody. If I were to ask you what your experience of using CodePen has been like, even though we hardly ever do that, you’d just be annoyed. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to keep spying on you instead. Kidding, kidding.
Thoughts?
Email me or comment below.
Also CodePen PRO is quite a deal. 🙏
My experience? Impressively average.
Totally. I love it when I get the “Congratulations! You’ve been selected for a short survey after this call…”
I think Jason Fried wrote about something similar not long ago: “It’s not an experience” or something like that.
“Your call is very important to us.” The more times you hear it on a call, the less true it is.
As somebody who works in Customer Service as a high-ish level, I can give you some insight on this.
This is just another metric to show line go up to wave their collective genitals in the air at their competition and very few people who have the ability to make change actually care as long as line stay green. Even if it doesn’t stay green, they’ll just faff the data until it does, but will also use that same data to beat down low level employees, some of which depend on an arbitrary score being the difference between eating that month or not.
Personally, I operated my teams in a way where our organic results were pretty good, and anything that wasn’t was investigated on a weekly basis. If we found there was something we needed to change in our own department, we did it, if it was something that the product team has been ignoring for months, we pushed back, and if it was just somebody who was angry and taking it out on the person who had the misfortune of crossing their path, we ignored it and it vanished out of the dataset never to do any real harm.
NPS is the new catch word of the day for startups and big corpos alike, they don’t know what it means but they know they just have to have it at any cost, expect to see a survey after everything for a while.
My only takeaway here is that, if you got one after speaking / chatting / writing to an actual human you should fill it in, five stars all the way (unless there is a real thing that person did that was in their control to you during that contact) as there is almost always a bonus they rely on to scrape by linked to it. Just don’t expect any real change to come from these things and don’t waste your time on a cold survey.