Amas
You decided to come take the beating in person today.
Bob
I did. It's the first time I've been in a room with you on a podcast, so I have left all the knives at home.
Amas
Awesome. Let's jump into it, because I do have a story to share with our audience today. So I'm at DFW airport. You go use the restroom. And ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't seen this on your way out, there's a little button thing that says, I've seen them press green for good, right, red for bad, right. They want my feedback. I don't know if the feedback is about my number one or number two or I'm assuming it's a cleanliness.
Bob
Yeah, we're going to edit that out.
Amas
It's the cleanliness of the bathroom. And no, we're not. Right. But number one, gross. But number two, it's occurred to me we have overdone the survey thing. Every single company wants my damn opinion to teach them how to treat me better. And I think we've gotten to a point, Bob, where we all should just boycott this whole survey business and just stop responding because it's gone too far.
Bob
Well, I don't respond to the one in the bathroom because I've seen the number of men who come in and don't wash their hands. So I'm not going to touch something right after I wash my hands. I still use a towel when I open the door for that same very reason. So I'm not going to do that one. But I think you've got that same problem you have often, which is you want to end everything when one thing doesn't go right. So I think there's opportunities for surveys to go really well. In fact, I'll tell you about a story that I have. I've been in customer service for 40 years, and I can count on my hand, on my one hand, the number of times that somebody has ever followed up to a bad survey. So what's interesting about that, if you look at it, part of our podcast focus is to help the consumer know what's going on behind the closed doors of customer service and what's going on behind the closed doors is not a whole lot with surveys. When surveys, customer sat surveys in my contact center were tied to my bonus, I would always pull them up because I wanted to know what my bonus was going to be that month. Now, if it was really bad information, then I might read through them and pay attention to them. If it was really good information, I still might read them, but I didn't do anything with them. But I had an experience recently where I was working with a local drug company, local pharmacy, and it was a bad experience and I trashed them. I gave them ones and twos in a scale of one to ten.
Amas
Right.
Bob
I could not have been more confused when someone called me from the company and said, I'm calling to talk to you about your service because you turned in a survey that said that we didn't do very well. You had some specific things and we would like to learn from you how to be better. That's impressive. That is, if you got those kind of responses, would you give up on.
Amas
No, no, I think, look, I am, of course, right. But let's indulge Bob for a second. So let's say there's some good that can come out of surveys. I think the issue you just brought up, this issue of follow up, is my biggest beef with it. The DFW, airport people, if you're listening, you do not need me to tell you whether your bathroom is clean or not.
Bob
Just clean the bathroom. Just clean the bathroom and keep it clean.
Amas
All that's happening is so that you can put yourself in the airport magazine. I'm assuming that's a thing. As the cleanest, you will aggregate all the numbers and say 90% of, but only you benefit from that. Me, the consumer, and everyone else listening. Our experience is not improved by taking the survey. So that's really the beef with it. So let's just say we're not going to all stop listening to surveys because there is half of the audience who listens to this guy and half of the audience who are right and listen to me. What advice do you give to people on how to fill service? Do they just fill all of them out? Are we all working for these companies now?
Bob
Well, I think it depends on what your experience was. And there's also a reality in the industry of service that customers have a higher propensity to fill out a survey that is negative than they do positive.
Amas
Correct.
Bob
So if I get a bad score, I will argue till the end of day that I'm only getting bad scores. People who get good service don't fill out surveys. So maybe I'm doing it for that. Maybe I'm an old call center guy that doesn't have any more sense than to take my 5 minutes of my life and fill out a survey about what I experienced. But how do you fill them out? You fill them out honestly. And while not everyone reads the comments, that's where the money is. If you are a company that cares, if you are a company that cares about whether or not you're giving good service, one of the first things we used to do as consultants when we were doing customer experience work is to say, can you give me all of the data from the last six months of your customer SAT surveys? And we would analyze it and put it into categories and bring it back to the client. And it was always surprising that the client would go, I had no idea that we were that bad. And you would go, well, I got this data from stuff that's on your bookshelf. Right. So I think that in the consumer world, what we're trying to do is we're trying to help that company be better. And if you look at it from that perspective, then you're doing the right thing.
Amas
Yeah. I would also add, at least this is my deal. When you send me a survey, company is there, if there is a page two, I'm already gone.
Bob
Yeah, well, I got one the other day that was 16 pages long and there were like 35 questions. And I think I held on being me. That fills them out. I think I held on to about page nine, eight, nine, and I went, now I'm out.
Amas
I would also say the last tip I would give our audience is the best survey you can fill is not show back up to that company. Right. Because that is the hardest data. Right. So at the end of the day, what we're here to teach you is here's what goes on. If a company is treating you poorly and you have written them survey after survey and nothing's changing, the best survey is just stop doing business.
Bob
Absolutely.
Amas
If you can. So, Bob, we like to leave our audience with something fun or what you've learned or quotes. What's yours this week?
Bob
Yeah, I read one, I was looking at quotes about customer service. I read one from Bill Gates that I love. I'm not sure that Bill Gates is correctly necessarily connected to his customer the way he was when he made this statement. But he said, your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. And I believe that to be true. I believe that whenever at my contact center when I had a specialized group that handled churn and customers who were saying they were going to leave our cell phone company. I was doing customer service for a mobile cell organization. That information about why they were leaving was dispersed throughout the organization and that information is invaluable to a company if they listen. And so let's do this. If you're out there listening and you're a consumer and you happen to work at a company, you should go ask about your surveys and what's going on with them. If you're just a regular consumer and you don't work for a company, I think we said a couple of weeks ago maybe you could do surveys on your kids and give them surveys about how clean their room is and it would make you feel better about whether or not they were listening or not.
Amas
Exactly. Mine is going to be a Mark Twain quote, a twist on it. There are lies. There are damn lies and then there are surveys.
Bob
Yeah, you twisted that one pretty bad. You twisted that one pretty bad.
Amas
But I do know, Bob, the thing you said about the gold is in the comments is you can ask the questions. Companies will ask the questions in creative ways to help drive a score and a number. And the best story I have on this is BlackBerry was getting high net promoter score. This is the customer CSAT scores that they got and everything was going great and they went out of business the next year. So it's one of those things where if companies were more apt to look at the text and the information you actually fill out, I'll fill more surveys out. Like, Bob, my hesitancy is because we know what goes on behind the scenes.
Bob
Well, the customer's perception is the reality and if you don't know that their perception is bad then you're missing the boat.
Amas
Bob, it's been awesome seeing you in person. Absolutely beating up on you again today. So for those of you out there, please like ask us questions on what you want us to debate next. If you're having any problems with customer service, shoot us those questions.
Bob
We're here. I think I'll look at the camera and say I think that's really important. Like if you're enjoying the banter we have take the chance to send something into us. You can message us on Instagram, you can message us on Spotify, on TikTok for that matter, and we'll check them and we'll put together a show about it.
Amas
Absolutely. Give me more questions to beat this guy up on. All right, we'll talk to you all next week.
