Jon Honeyball is decidedly unsatisfied with the whole customer satisfaction business

I

’m getting increasingly annoyed with spam email. I don’t mean the old-school nonsense telling me that some noble person has decided to leave me $10,000,000 and they need my help to get the money out of the country.

I don’t even mean the sort of spam that comes along with being on too many marketing databases. A few years back, I made the fatal mistake of giving my home email address to the organisers of CES (the consumer electronics show, held in Las Vegas in January each year) as my press contact. This went onto the press mailing list, and suddenly every company on the planet, from major players to the smallest mom-and-pop workshop in China, decided I needed to be emailed on a regular basis.

No, I’m talking about the stuff you get once you have had some legitimate contact with a business. Buy something online and the new normal is getting an email in the following days asking you to rate how much you were exquisitely thrilled by the whole process.

If you dare to not reply, you can expect a whole raft of subsequent emails chiding you that “since we haven’t heard from you, we thought we’d harass you once again” in the hope that you will provide feedback.

I can understand why a vendor would want to get a good rating, especially if it’s a hotel or restaurant. It helps some users when trying to find somewhere to eat or stay. It doesn’t really help anyone when I am asked to rate the experience of receiving the half a dozen Ethernet cables that I needed.

Where they beautifully packed? Was the box experience what I wanted? Did I positively shiver with delight at the credit card payment process? Would I recommend this exquisite moment to a friend? If so, could I hand over their address so they could be contacted too? After all, I really should want to share the delight with everyone.

I don’t respond to these. I carefully check the “From:” address, and if it’s not the same as the main receipt address for the company, it goes straight into the spam list. I will, as a matter of course, hit the “Unsubscribe” button. Assuming that there is one.

I have come to the conclusion that there’s a conspiracy going on here, and I point the finger at the companies who offer these sorts of customer satisfaction measurement tools. In the past, it was quite simple – a few questions such as, “Was it okay?”, “Did you get it on time?”, “Would you buy from us again?”

Now, however, it has turned into a click-by-click medical examination of the entire process. Was the delivery driver cheerful? Was he cheerful enough? Too cheerful? How was the handing-over experience? The colour of the box? Were the bubbles in the bubble wrap loud enough when you popped them?

And, worse still, there has been a complete misappropriation of descriptions. The industry has shifted from finding out if something went wrong to a whole kaleidoscope of happiness on a 1 to 10 scale, from deeply unhappy to utterly delirious.

It’ s particularly irksome that the metric has shifted from“adequate” to “delighted”. There’s no such thing as a delightful delivery experience, unless the driver decides to offer services above and beyond. I ordered the product, I knew what I was expecting, it was delivered on time. The item wasn’t broken, lost or soggy from being left in the rain, and it didn’t appear to have been drop-kicked into the delivery van. That is a perfectly adequate experience. There’s no such thing as a “10 out of 10 delighted” experience to getting what I ordered, on time and in working order. I can be delighted about the salmon sashimi in a restaurant. I cannot be delighted about my UPS delivery, even though our local chap is unfailingly polite and cheerful.

So I call upon you, dear reader, for a new reality in these ratings. Assuming you can be bothered to wade through these things, please join me in a firm consideration of the term “adequate”. There is nothing wrong with “adequate” – it is something we should demand, and be satisfied when it is delivered.

While you’re at it, give a serious spanking to those companies whose customer questionnaires look suspiciously quick, and then take you down a rabbit hole of dozens of questions. I gave up on a British Airways questionnaire when it asked me about all the airlines I had flown with in the previous (pre-Covid) year, and then asked me what felt like a hundred ratings about each of them in turn, all using a jaunty coloured slider from disappointed to delighted on a multiple step scale.

This customer feedback industry has got out of control. Now, who can I tell that I am very unhappy with the whole experience?

Was the delivery driver cheerful? Was he cheerful enough? Too cheerful? How was the handing-over experience? The colour of the box?