I just filled out an online survey after a positive interaction with an online chat representative (a human) because I wanted to give him a thumbs up.
The survey was (to my relief) relatively short, so kudos to the design team. Sometimes, filling out these surveys gives the impression of a gift that keeps on giving - the more answers you give them, the more time they presume they can take from your schedule!
The last question of this survey has me spooked. It asked me to rate whether it was easy to find the support I needed.
I gave them a low score because like every other online service, despite paying a subscription fee, they put up a lot of barriers between me and the human rep. The button to get to a human is buried miles deep. The automated query engine that supposedly finds relevant support articles so I can "self-help" is embarrassingly juvenile - it always feels like using Google where they present a bunch of links that are just basic keyword matches. Whoever designs these systems fail to recognize that I am one of those people who contact them after having wasted time searching through their support documents.
Gone are the days where you have a one-click access to an online support rep.
What I realized is the support team will never get the above feedback from me. Why? Because the designers of the survey ensures that this will not happen. The survey gives me a choice of five reasons why I gave them the (poor) rating for the ease of finding support. These reasons are things like the number of transfers between reps or channels, the waiting time to get a rep, and so on. None of these capture my grievance, and there isn't an "other" option or a text box. So I picked none of them, and finished the survey.
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The point of this quick note is that more surveys are being conducted now than ever before, because the online medium has drastically lowered the cost of collecting responses. However, a lot of these surveys will not give the marketing team the useful data they're hoping to get because they aren't designed to do so.
I won't get into the politics of this in this post. I'd just say that it's not necessarily incompetence. It might be intentional.
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What are some of the positive things I wanted to say about that service interaction?
Once I got the online chat open, I was directly added to a queue for a human rep - there wasn't this nonsense of throwing even more bots at me that offer more nonsensical search results. The other day, I was on a different chatbot who boldly proclaimed that it doesn't understand my wish to "connect me to a human representative". It didn't tell me it couldn't do this, it claimed that it couldn't understand what I wanted, and asked me to rephrase my question. And it repeated the same response for each rephrasing I tried until I quit.
Also, the rep made a short video clip that shows a simulation of my account pages when demonstrating how to do something. This visual aid helps a lot compared to just chat messenges.
The rep was also quite patient as I tried to steer the conversation towards the precise problem I was having, and away from the general problem. Eventually, he resolved all my questions. Bravo!
I would suggest that if a site wants to get a rating, they ask ONE REQUIRER question, of the form:
How satisfied are you with the interaction 1...9
If you submit early (10 more to go), are you willing to talk to a person? {Yes} or {No}
That way, the survey can be very short, have follow-up answers, and give the user an option to discuss their interaction with a PERSON.
Posted by: Mike Liveright | 01/16/2025 at 02:54 PM