The car broke down the other day. It’s electric so not straightforward. Had to be transported to a specified garage. It needed a replacement part which had to be ordered. The whole process took 3 weeks and lots of phone calls. Throughout the young women in customer services was outstandingly helpful. So when we collected our car and she made a point of asking us to complete a short customer satisfaction feedback form on line we were more than happy to do so.

However I was rather taken back at the way she phased the request. She said,” Please give me a 10 or I’ll get into trouble “. Apparently anything less than 10 out of 10 and management are unhappy. The feedback form was completed the following day. We were very happy to give Rebecca 10 out of 10 for the support and help she provided, always ringing us back and keeping us updated on progress.

However we were less impressed with the fact that it took 3 weeks to fix the car especially the week it took for the, ‘specialist’ to come out and diagnose the problem. Our scoring reflected this. Concerned that the form gave no scope for explanatory comments we contacted Rebecca to explain our reasoning. Only to be informed management had already contacted her requiring an explanation for the fact that the feedback was not all 10’s. It was obvious from the down beat tone of the usually very buoyant Rebecca that this had not been a pleasant experience.

I shared this story with family and friends and discovered this type of misuse of simple feedback forms by organisations is quite common. Clearly if an organisation wants reliable and useful feedback staff should not be pressurising customers to give nothing less than a 10. Equally using the feedback forms to, “beat up “ staff who fail to get a 10 out of 10 every time is so unreasonable as to constitute bullying. Especially when the person being criticised is not responsible for the area of criticism.