this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
483 points (99.2% liked)
Science Memes
15517 readers
3950 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !reptiles and [email protected]
Physical Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !self [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
i see this all the time with software designed by americans. on an old job we used a tool called "officevibe" where you'd enter your current impression of your role and workplace once a month. you got some random questions to answer on a 10-degree scale.
when we were presented with the result the stats were terrible because the scale was weighted so that everything below 7 was counted as negative. we were all just answering 5 for "it's okay", 3-4 for "could use improvement", and 6-7 for "better than expected". there had never been a 10 in the stats, and the software took that as "this place sucks".
like, of course you downvote a bad response. you're supposed to help the model get better, right?
I once got a call from a telecom marketing department because I rated a customer service agent with a 9 out of 10. When I told them it was not for anything the agent did, just that the store the support was in was extremely difficult to find, the caller got a bit aggressive. Like they expected me to shit talk this poor lady who had been so nice to me, just hard to find, and it was all corpo's fault. The store wasn't properly branded and signaled. She couldn't take any comment that was negative on the company, just on the employee. So I told her how ridiculously stupid that system was. That I wanted to change my score to a perfect ten, comment, the best employee this company has, even better than the CEO. The caller got obviously upset. Told her to write down that if they ever call me again I will immediately cancel my contract. She went with, is there anything else I could help you with? Which is call center code for "I want to hang up".
I once worked for a call center. Customers like you who rate an agent based on things the agent has no control over are the worst. Guaranteed they took employment action on them.
Then they should ask that. The question was redacted as a blanket statement for the entire support experience, which was really good overall. Everything else I rated a 10, including the quality of the attention received. We don't need to make this excuses for bad management practices.
I don't know how the survey question was phrased, only how you wrote your comment, which indicated you rated the agent poorly, not the entire support experience.
9 out of 10 is not poorly. And that is exactly the core of the comment. They saw a 9 and acted as if I was beaten with a bat and verbally abused by this poor lady. This perception is their problem, they are completely out of touch with reality.
I simultaneously disagree with them considering a 9 a failure and your rating the agent less because of something outside of their control.
but as a customer i can't be expected to know that a less-than-stellar review of my customer service experience (which i only contact if i already have issues and therefore am predisposed to be irritated at) will reflect badly on the person who fielded my call unless they explicitly tell me that beforehand, which they won't because that's not information that the customers need and they don't really want to be known for treating their personnel badly.
i may have rated the experience a 9 because the phone tree to get to a human was confusing, or because the hold music was shit, or because the agent had to look things up in the company's slow-ass system so i had to wait. there are a million ways to have a bad time when calling customer service, and if you ask me to rate the experience with one number i would never in a million years give it a 10 unless everything is solved the instant i call.
I hear you on that, and your position makes much more sense now that you've explained their survey wasn't asking the questions well or you misinterpreted them.
Mine had portions for my performance and the overall company's performance separately, but I still received poor ratings (and written comments) for actions other people took that I had no control over, like giving your new dentist a bad rating because you broke a tooth skateboarding before your first visit with them.
"How are your teeth doing?" "Bad."
Versus
"How was your dentist appointment today?" "Good" + "What is your dental history?" "Bad."
now, i'm not the guy that had the original customer service experience you were mad at but that's my experience with them. whenever they're split up i rate the "agent performance" at 100% and everything else at whatever i felt they deserved, because if there's one job that does not deserve more hate its customer service phone jockeys.
but yeah, usually the questions are entirely unfit. our office review thing offered stuff like "i can contribute to my team to further the company's goals". it was a consultancy working on-site with customers. we didn't have teams.
Hey man, listen. Call centers suck. I worked at a call center, and it really really sucked. I'd be the first to empathize with workers locked up in call centers.
But this wasn't even about a call center. It was a support experience survey for going to a physical store that offers support as one of the many things they sell and offer there. The place is not owned by the telecom company, they aren't their employees.
The problem, again, is that the people designing, sending, collecting and overreacting to the support survey probably weren't ever anywhere close to a remotely similar place. Which just shows how utterly useless and pointless the whole exercise is and how it is actually counterproductive to be honest on these corpo surveys.