"I think it's appropriate to inform her that she may be contacted by Customer Service regarding a survey just to give her a 'heads up.' However, I would not mention anything about her comments affecting my bonus. I think doing so is unprofessional; completely unrelated to her inquiry on the products and services provided by Countrywide; and frankly, none of her concern."
The scenario dealt with an employee working with a very satisfied customer who would later receive a customer satisfaction survey that could impact the employee's bonus.
Most employees agreed that the employee should not discuss the extent to which his bonus would be affected by the customer's survey response. Similarly, many employees agreed with the Compliance Center that notifying the customer of the upcoming survey was the right thing to do.
Lovely the way that "most employees" are rhetorically in agreement with the corporate policy -- sort of the way "everybody loves" cornflakes.
This sort of evaluation now takes place throughout business and industry -- you cannot make a major purchase, it seems, or learn anything, without filling out a customer survey form. But I think it is a shame -- so naive was I when I first encountered the corproate training evals that I'd later give to people I tried as frequently as twice a day, that I actually thought they were akin to the end-of-semester evals in college, which were mostly about recommended new aspects of the course (at least in my memory). That is, I thought I was supposed to do something differently than circle all the "5"s or "10"s or whatever.
I was grateful to the person who clued me in that the poor trainer, training me in something I already knew (a corproation had sent its entire department, including its *very young* managers), was paid based on my comments, and would most certainly follow up on them, and up the food chain, because the training company would be so concerned at my refusal to fill in all "5"s.
Even still, our training evals were anonymous (one could always tell who was who, however -- they were handwritten); the ones at this company are NOT.
All this time later, in academe and in training, admins love to work the eval. Bad managers love pretty pie and bar charts with neat meaningless quantitative information such as that evals gather, and generally only the most motivated senior tech writer or curriculum dev spec or some such reads the actual written comments about the course and its delivery.
So is it fair to let someone know the position of a given eval? That you may be docked in pay if you get less than all perfect scores? That you wont get a bonus as the result of evals off business deals -- wow -- it is not even the size of the deals, the money making, any more, but if the customer was "pleased"? That a nonteacher / trainer with not very much business experience will call you in for a long harangue?
The scenario dealt with an employee working with a very satisfied customer who would later receive a customer satisfaction survey that could impact the employee's bonus.
Most employees agreed that the employee should not discuss the extent to which his bonus would be affected by the customer's survey response. Similarly, many employees agreed with the Compliance Center that notifying the customer of the upcoming survey was the right thing to do.
Lovely the way that "most employees" are rhetorically in agreement with the corporate policy -- sort of the way "everybody loves" cornflakes.
This sort of evaluation now takes place throughout business and industry -- you cannot make a major purchase, it seems, or learn anything, without filling out a customer survey form. But I think it is a shame -- so naive was I when I first encountered the corproate training evals that I'd later give to people I tried as frequently as twice a day, that I actually thought they were akin to the end-of-semester evals in college, which were mostly about recommended new aspects of the course (at least in my memory). That is, I thought I was supposed to do something differently than circle all the "5"s or "10"s or whatever.
I was grateful to the person who clued me in that the poor trainer, training me in something I already knew (a corproation had sent its entire department, including its *very young* managers), was paid based on my comments, and would most certainly follow up on them, and up the food chain, because the training company would be so concerned at my refusal to fill in all "5"s.
Even still, our training evals were anonymous (one could always tell who was who, however -- they were handwritten); the ones at this company are NOT.
All this time later, in academe and in training, admins love to work the eval. Bad managers love pretty pie and bar charts with neat meaningless quantitative information such as that evals gather, and generally only the most motivated senior tech writer or curriculum dev spec or some such reads the actual written comments about the course and its delivery.
So is it fair to let someone know the position of a given eval? That you may be docked in pay if you get less than all perfect scores? That you wont get a bonus as the result of evals off business deals -- wow -- it is not even the size of the deals, the money making, any more, but if the customer was "pleased"? That a nonteacher / trainer with not very much business experience will call you in for a long harangue?
Comments
Two things.
1) Having been doing customer sat studies for over 10 years, I have concluded that the most effective way is to tell the customer that your job is to assure their satisfaction and that you want to make sure that they are completely satisfied with your service. Of course this has different implications, depending on whether or not you are responsible for just this contact or the ongoing relationship.
2) I'm on a personal campaign: The use of "gender" versus "sex". As used in your profile.
"Gender" generally applies to parts of speech, i.e., nouns, pronouns, etc. For example, the gender of man is male.
"Sex" applies to (generally) living beings (except of course for electrical connections, etc.), i.e., my sex is male. Or, my child's sex is female.
Gender categorizes words, sex categorizes living things.
In electrical connections, some of them are referred to as "sex changers," meaning a connector that is male on one end and female on the other. Sometimes called "gender-benders."
I enjoyed your thoughts.