Gaming for a higher NPS
The call center agent, a friendly lady, finishes the conversation; “Madam, you will receive an email with a survey later. This also asks you to give me an evaluation. This is meant for my personal review. What rating would you give me? Between 0 and 10? ". While she poses this question, I am taken by surprise, and stammer: "A nine... " She doesn't ask why I give this number and we end the call. (these are not the exact words that have been said, but it reflects certainly the drift of the conversation)
Is this new? That a call center agent first asks for the rating? For me it was clearly a first and I really don't get it. From the profession of Customer Experience, I question these practices.
Looking back at this conversation, I recognize three cases of Gaming, which I have given names to make them recognizable for you. (Gaming is a term about influencing scores (NPS, CSAT, CES, and so on)
- The effect of asking about the grade and that this was important for the personal assessment of the call center agent. I call that bribery.
- The effect that I am taken by surprise by this question and I don’t want to give her a bad feeling in this very short phone call. So I give a relatively high mark, while the conversation was really not worth it. I call this the effect of social desirability.
- She first reports that I get a survey and then ask me personally how I evaluate her. I call this "framing", with the effect of a higher chance that I complete the survey. And so the company gets a higher response rate and a higher mark.
What's most striking to me, is that I have not received a survey a week after the interview.
I also wonder why I have to have a survey. Don't they have speech analytics that can extract the grade from the conversation? And what is even more striking, of course, is that the employee does ask for the grade, but is not allowed to put it into the system herself. Which, by the way, often causes Gaming, because what is nicer than giving yourself a higher grade. Especially if it is low by accident?
The most important thing when asking about customer feedback is of course curiosity. Curiosity about what I have experienced as a customer. What was good, what could have been better. Not the outcome in a figure. That is where things go wrong. Sigh. Deep sigh. She has my number, a nine, but as a customer I couldn’t care less, because the conversation was really mediocre.
Now I am curious. Which forms of Gaming have you experienced in the past weeks? What examples have you seen of Gaming that were merely about numbers, not about learning what the company could improve?
** Nienke Bloem CCXP is an expert in Customer Experience, both as Keynote Speaker, teacher of the 2 day CX Masterclass to prepare you for the CCXP exam and she is co-founder of the customer experience game. Do you want to read her blogs or learn more about her? Visit her website or subscribe to her monthly CX Greetz. **
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