It was only a couple of lightbulbs, a bottle of floor cleaner and, as I headed for a self-service checkout at the supermarket, a cheeky packet of Haribo. Not exactly a downpayment on a car or even something exciting from Apple. Total price: Dh65. Regardless, by the time I reached home, there was an email inviting me to rate my recent “retail experience”. “Well, the lightbulbs work,” I thought, as I pressed delete. Then there was a recent “interaction” with an official entity, via mobile app, after which I was requested to rate the service. Ironically, despite my overwhelmingly positive experience, a technical error prevented my smiley-face emoji from being entered into the system. And more recently, I had a very pleasant online typing chat with what I assume was an AI (apologies to "Darrell” if I’m wrong) about niggling issues I was having with my laptop. All were resolved very quickly. But then: would I like to rate my customer service journey? Somewhat bafflingly, one of the answers was “comfortable”. From daily chores to annual car maintenance, monthly haircuts, weekly grocery shops or one-off hospital visits – a near-pervasive feedback culture has insidiously crept into all our lives. If there isn’t an SMS or email immediately demanding your attention after you swipe your credit card, fear not: almost certainly there will be an opportunity as you walk out of a shop or a bank, or even off an aeroplane, to stab a finger at a screen bearing one of three faces – one happy, one sad and one, I guess, somewhere in the middle. Apathetic? Ambivalent? I am sure that the big brains in customer service departments around the world believe these feedback interaction points – my term – are unquestionably all a good idea, beyond reproach. But always, all the time, every time and it becomes pointless white noise, a niggling background hiss to soundtrack our lives. As if don’t get enough garbage in our inboxes. I don’t want to reflect or pontificate on everything I spend my money on. Do I really need to tell an online plant retailer what I thought of my peace lily? And, of course, inevitably I will also be asked to rate the quality of the delivery company. This professional spamming of our lives – carried out ostensibly, I assume, in the name of effecting positive change – is the net result of two issues: scale and distance. There is no way for, say, the large tech companies, with a combined loyal customer or user base numbering in the hundreds of millions, to have enough human beings on standby to deal with every qualm and quibble. Outsourcing queries to AI bots is one solution, albeit still inelegant and with a broad spectrum of success, but another is to simply and cheaply request that feedback directly, from the source. Even if only a tiny percentage of people respond to emails, SMSs and online surveys just a small amount of the time, the result is still a huge data set on which these companies (you would hope) act. But it is exactly those companies with the worst customer service reputations – and you know who you are – who are often the most enthusiastic in their requests for feedback. Bad reputations are easily won and difficult to lose, especially when tangible improvements are evidently never made, leaving respondents with the bitter aftertaste of time wasted. So, not only do these litmus surveys become tedious to consumers, but they also have the opposite of the desired effect: by trying to engage with the people who spend money with you, you are actually alienating them more. As for the distance issue, quite simply the more our lives are lived and shopped exclusively online, the more valuable face-to-face with an attentive and well-trained human assistant has become a thing of the past. “The customer is always right” is a very hard maxim to operate by when all a company knows about you is your email and shipping addresses and prior shopping habits. But if feedback forms and emails are considered the only way to bridge these divides, an argument can easily be made for an urgent rethink. What that solution is, I don’t know – I am not a customer service professional. What I am is a typical consumer who would happily never receive another message telling me “My Feedback is Important”. Anyway, now you’ve reached the end of this column, how would you rate your reading experience?
