Or maybe they are learning something, just not what they are telling you.
Last week I had some furniture delivered. Everything went fine. The crew showed up on time, did a clean install, didn’t leave a mess. No issues at all.
As they were wrapping up, one of them handed me a card and said something like, “You’ll be getting a survey soon. If you don’t mind giving us a 10, we’d appreciate it. Anything less counts against us.”
You’ve probably heard that line before. Car dealers do it. Appliance installers. Pretty much anywhere there’s a big ticket and a follow-up form.
It’s almost always the same thing: please fill out the survey, and by the way, if you don’t give us a perfect score, we get dinged for it.
I get what they’re trying to do, but it’s hard to see how that kind of setup gives you any useful feedback. Once someone frames it that way, most people are going to give the 10 just to avoid causing trouble for the person who asked. Even if the experience was just okay, you don’t want to be the reason they get written up.
And that’s the problem. If the only acceptable score is a 10, it’s not really a survey anymore. It’s just another checkbox. Nobody’s learning anything from it.
So why do companies keep doing it?
Sometimes it’s just corporate box-checking. They want to make sure the tech handed out the card or said the line they were supposed to. Other times, it gives management an easy way to say, “Look at our scores, everything’s great,” whether it actually is or not.
And it might be something else too. A way to tag the people who respond. Someone who takes the time to leave a score, especially a perfect one, might be more likely to respond to future offers, or more likely to say yes to something else down the road.
Whatever the reason, I don’t think it’s helping them get better at what they do.
It’s probably helping them feel better about what they already are.
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