CSAT Surveys!

[TSR Jockey]

Hello fellow CS members!

So a little background, I've been a long-time lurker of CS, but this is my first post. I work in a call centre for a major technology manufacturer. NDA's and common sense prohibit me from being more specific. My ongoing frustration with the current system in place (the CSAT email survey system) is what finally prompted to finally register on this site!

While this post involves customers to a huge extent, it does not focus on SC's persay. But rather the Sucky CSAT System currently in place by my company and its client. I'm sure many of you who have worked in call centres before are famililar with having some kind of CSAT system in place. Basically the way our system works, is that after we have finished talking to the customer, they receive a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey via email. It asks them rank their overall satisfaction with us on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being very dissatisfied, 3 being neutral, 5 being very satisfied)

This CSAT system is the most assinine flawed system I have ever had the unpleasure of dealing with. Reasons why?

• Customers often fill in the survey based on their overall experience with the company, and not based how their last interaction with that agent went. For example their overall experience may rank a 2 on the survey, even though the customer loves you to pieces and would personally rank you a 4 or 5. Thus penalizing you even if you *WOW* the customer.
  
• Customers often fill in the survey based on a completely different issue/different agent, than the actual issue that you addressed (and resolved) for the customer. Customers often dont mention previous issues and previous agents often don't save notes (to avoid the survey), so how am I supposed to know! And I end up getting the bad survey as a result!!
  
• Customers often send in a bad survey if their phone support is expired. Regardless of how empathetic we are, regardless of how well our positioning is and helping the customer explore options, we get penalized for following procedure and not giving away free support!
  
• Same for when we have to refer customer to a 3pty or things fall outside our scope of support/SOP. Too many times we can bust out all the mad soft skillz on the world, but all too often a bad survey is returned.
  
• Any survey that is returned with less than a 4, counts against us. A neutral counts every bit as much as a bottom box/very dissatisfied. The concept of a 'bottom box' target really is a moot point.
  
• How the scoring system works is as follows. The csat metric is expressed as a percentage. It takes the total number of csat surveys returned in a fiscal month and compares it with the total surveys rated 4 or greater. The resulting percentage is your csat score for the month. Anything less than 85%, you get written up and put on an progressive action plan
  
• Out of all the metrics we are held too, this is one metric where the action plans progress the quickest and can ultimately lead to getting fired. It doesnt' matter if you have otherwise perfect AHT/ACW, attendance, schedule adherance etc.
  
• There is no wiggle room for the above scoring system. Doesnt matter if you miss by less than 0.5%, no rounding up is allowed. Doesnt matter if it was caused by that one crap bad survey returned for reasons mentioned above.
  
• Surveys cannot be overruled/dis-counted for any of the above reasons. This is firm. Pretty much all my TL's / supervisors have been great. They totally understand where I'm coming from and I'm sure most TL's agree its a flawed system, but of course their not allowed to say that. They also have no discretion of overturning a BS survey. They are forced to bow to the whims of their own managers / corporate by upholding the flawed csat system.

Two actual recent examples that happened to me recently. Last week I received a neutral survey, customer comments stating that the customer was frustrated at having to visiting the store/repair centre just after they purchased their new product. I go in and check my case notes. My notes are along the lines of "had customer reset router and walked customer through reconfiguring it, customer is now online, issue resolved". It seems that the customer likely called in with a separate issue, and got an agent that didn't save any notes. Whereas I saved notes, and thus I get penalized , as this survey pushed me below the cutoff percentage.

Today I come in from my regular two days off, hoping there is a good survey returned to counter balance the bad one. Not only did not get what I was hoping for, but got ANOTHER bad survey to start the month! Customer comments were along the lines of "Store representative didnt know what he was doing and said it was a hardware issue and booked me a second appointment, I called tech support and the agent (me) resolved my issue within 10 minutes. Guess who gets the lovely bad survey to start off the new month with???? Thank god it was such a slow afternoon and they were allowing agents to leave for a few hours I was soooo upset

I understand the need to have some kind of csat system in place, without any kind of regulation/targets it would be an open invite to sucky agents. However the current system seriously SERIOUSLY needs to have a complete overhaul.

Anways, so this wraps up my first post, sorry if I was abit ranty. Feel free to add your other csat stories/ventings here.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

IMO, customer service surveys are completely useless. At least the way the suits use them.

We have those surveys at the swamp. The URL for the survey site is printed right on the receipt. The customer can then rate the specific store on a number of standards--is the store clean, were the employees friendly, were there enough carts inside the store, how long was your wait to check out, were you offered an extended protection plan if you bought a qualifying item--stuff like that.

The rating is on a 1-5 scale. 1 is the worst, 5 is the best. Only 5s get counted as "good". Anything less than that counts as "bad." So why use the 1 to 5 scale then? Why not just have two choices: Good or Bad?

And then if you have a bad week on your surveys, even if previous surveys have been good, the suits freak out and demand to know what's going on. Why are the customers so unhappy? You got an 89% last week and a 58% this week! What's the story?

There's also a rolling average of your last few weeks of surveys (I think it is 5). That means if a good week comes off your average because it was 6 weeks ago, and a bad week gets tacked on, your score suffers.

What would be more useful is to look at trends over a period of time. Are there certain areas that are constantly receiving low scores week after week? Those would be good concerns to focus on. If the scores in a certain area are fluctuating all over the place week to week, then that really doesn't prove anything, other than some respondents are more picky than others.

We didn't have a good week on our last customer service survey, after a few pretty good ones. Betcha the store manager will have to calm down the suits and assure them we're not spitting on the customers, or he already has tried.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

I had the same type of survey system at our call center, where you could get penalized on a great call because the survey was meant for the customer to rate their entire exprience with our company. So if they deal with some incompetent jackhole who then transferred them to me and I fixed the problem perfectly, I could still get a bad score because of said jackhole.

We were able to appeal these scores, but in a lot of cases, the perfectly logical and legit appeals would be denied (shocking I know). Later it was replaced with a new system where you would FAIL the call if you did ANYTHING wrong, absolutely anything.

Screw up the greeting? FAIL.
Deviate from script? FAIL.
Not attempt to upsell to a customer you just pissed off? FAIL.

I am glad I left the company not long after that stupid system was implemented.

Now what I deal with is more like Irv's store. Corp is always on our back to get customers to do those damned surveys. What bothers me is the current survey is 50 questions long!



Now who in the hell wants to spend that long filling out a survey?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I guess it could be worse--we could still have secret shoppers. At least we generally do well on our surveys.

The secret shoppers--not so much. They were there to make sure we did very specific things when helping customers. If you missed any of them, your score went down. And they would go around testing multiple people in the store.

Our scores on those secret shops were always awful. Bottom-of-the-barrel awful. Out of the 130 or so stores in the company, we once ranked 125th on our secret shopper scores. Of course corporate will be hounding you with scores that bad.

Hey, people just forget sometimes.

[TSR Jockey]

So today I head in to work. The day started off pretty good. Had 2 good csats come in, scored an hour off the phones right off the hop doing a product training roundtable, and the queue was slow enough, approx 10 min between calls Sounds ripe for a good chillax decent day at work.

But was it meant to be ? of course not. In my previous post I mentioned the csat scoring system is from 1 - 5 and 85% of your surveys in a given month must be 4 or greater. For the previous month of November, I missed the cutoff by 0.5%, lousy details as to what led to that are in my post above. I was hoping they would cut me some slack on a local level anyway as far as proceeding with the csat action plan. No such luck, I had someone sitting with me listening to my calls for 2.5hrs - 3hrs straight today. Its not so much having my calls listened to I have an issue with, its inevitably part of the job. It moreso receiving the same treatment as someone who gets a 50% overall csat for the month. Of course, with my calls receiving extra attention today, this led to the conclusion that my previous months csat score in fact, stuck. BOOOOO!!!! Of course, the person listening to me today said all my calls were fine. Even one my calls that was also remoted for quality purposes said I was fine. Side note- in this call, the customer was being an SC because I wouldnt walk them through importing/illegally copying retail DVD's!

Our quality coach totally agreed with me on all of the above. He's a decent chill guy. In fact he pointed out that my rolling 3 month average was well above the 85% cutoff, and implied I really shouldnt be on this plan. But I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, I believe most TL's and quality coaching team share the same feeling about the flawed system, and nearly everyone does on a local level. Leadership team at this level is of course at the mercy of corporate and that its the suits that have their heads up their arses!

The flawed system I must point out, also has some flaws that work in our favour Depending on the type of case you received, how many other times it was handled etc, there are tricks to basically obtain a 'clean profile/case' to work with....if one feels its gonna lead to a bad csat

Irv I must say, in some ways your csat system is even more flawed. A 4 is considered bad? wow.....omg totally uncool of the suits that is an understatement. In an ideal world, for either system, it should be yes or no. Or by using the 1 - 5 system, 4 -5 should be considered good, and 3 should simply not count either way.

So that is my little continued rant for tonight. Im off to bed, hopefully no further surprises await me tomorrow.

[Sandman]

Side note- in this call, the customer was being an SC because I wouldnt walk them through importing/illegally copying retail DVD's!

I say get someone to ask the client if they want you to help out with a criminal act. Of course they would say no.. so then show them that call then that will show them what's wrong with CSAT scores.

[simplyanother]

Hate those damned customer surveys. The more people who reply, the worse we do.

One week, we got 100% satisfaction.

Because only one person replied and apparently, she was in a good mood.

[infinitemonkies]

I realize this is logic, which has no connection to corporate policy, but shouldn't an individuals performance be compared to the rest of the department? I mean, if your average rating is pretty much the same as everyone else's, they shouldn't really have room to single you out, right?

[EricKei]

First off: to , TSR!

Second -- this reminds me of when I was at "GameStore" regularly many years ago. They loved to find ANY excuse to ding a store. One of the more annoying ones was when they would go after a store for being "deficient" one one area while stellar in the others...Naturally, they only cared about the "bad" one.

For example, let's say the metrics were: used games traded in, used vs new sales (most of which the workers can do nothing about -- this would suck, and therefore, get people yelled at, when huge games like Madden or Halo came out), pre-order sales, magazine subscriptions, and add-ons. I overheard part of a conf call while I was working in the back one day. Our store was in the top 2 stores of our district in all but one of these; in the other, we were firmly in the middle of the pack. Corporate's line (to the SM) could be summed up as: "You're doing great on X, Y, and Z, keep it up! ...But on this other one...Wow. I mean, are you even TRYING? I can only assume that the answer is No. Do you even want this job? You really need to work harder if you want to keep running a store..." -- Sadly, this is par for the course >_<

[TSR Jockey]

I say get someone to ask the client if they want you to help out with a criminal act. Of course they would say no.. so then show them that call then that will show them what's wrong with CSAT scores.

Absolutely they would say no, in fact helping them with that would count as an instant fail on a remote monitor. In a csat survey scenario though, if questioned, corporate would likely say we didnt position our answer well enough, use enough soft skills, wow the customer, turn that frown upside down etc, or some other crap like that . Truth is, if the customer is an SC, all of those customer service skills is not gonna make a world of difference when they get that survey.

I realize this is logic, which has no connection to corporate policy, but shouldn't an individuals performance be compared to the rest of the department? I mean, if your average rating is pretty much the same as everyone else's, they shouldn't really have room to single you out, right?

I ran the numbers on our queue today. About 1/3 to 1/2 of our queue is on The Plan this month. Most of them missed the magic number by 5% or less. In another given month, the very same people can be off The Plan, and vice-versa. Without getting into crazy long-winded details about this beloved system, it takes 6 straight months of >=85's to be 'fully truly' off the plan. The Plans are done on an individual basis, and many people are on Plans. Which creates a tonne of needless paperwork and coaching for our TL's, which understandably stresses them out. To do well, its a combination of a crapshoot and how well you can work the system.

First off: to , TSR!

.......Corporate's line (to the SM) could be summed up as: "You're doing great on X, Y, and Z, keep it up! ...But on this other one...Wow. I mean, are you even TRYING? I can only assume that the answer is No. Do you even want this job? You really need to work harder if you want to keep running a store..." -- Sadly, this is par for the course >_<

Thanks Yeah definately hear you that. Say csat is A, and all the other call centre metrics are B, C,D, E, F etc. "A" seems to trump all the others. While they do watch the others too, if you only do well on B, C, D, E, F, and are hit and miss on A for long enough, that is the quickest way to get your ass canned. Aside from removing the brain to mouth filter when on the phone.

[TSR Jockey]

So the last two days have actually been fairly uneventful No new csats have come in, though i need a few more good ones over the next couple weeks to hit the magic number. At least things resembled a *normal* day, and its my weekend finally.

[Andara Bledin]

I will post this link again:
http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/...rvey-data.html

This is an outstanding article about how customer surveys are completely misused by corporations. I think more than a few companies could use copies of this in their inboxes.

^-.-^

[Teysa]

My store recently stopped doing Customer Service Surveys. Okay, so it's because we're closing in a month or so. But at least we don't have to deal with them anymore.

[Skeksin]

Hrm. I think my company might be doing them correctly. We get QA on individual calls to make sure we use the branded opening and closing and then take care of the issue. All customer satisfaction surveys are done by an outbound group at a different date so there is no way to pin it on an individual phone rep unless the customer badmouths them specifically.

So my company would be using the CSAT to look for overall trends.

Makes me happy I'm working here rather than somewhere where on a scale of 1-5 anything less that a 5 fails.

[simplyanother]

Hate those damned surveys. They seem to print out only with pissy customers. Or maybe I just piss off every 5th customer.