Can We Have a Few Minutes of Your Time?

A pet peeve you may share

Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

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Can We Have a Few Minutes of Your Time?

You know how this goes. You’ve just spent more time than you thought you would on the phone straightening out an airline reservation, or clarifying a credit card bill, or perhaps you are trying to return an item to a retailer. Inevitably, the last thing you hear is a request to “rate” the call or rate the “service you have received.” You don't want to, for crying’ out loud you just spent more time on that call than you could have imagined. And then you wonder, why should I do this? But somehow it makes sense–maybe they will treat me better next time– to comply.

Yes, the question of compensation is a legitimate one, this is not “one minute” of your time, it is hours if you comply with all of these requests. There should be some inducement for the customer to make the time to either fill in blanks and check off yes or no online or continue to remain on a call that took more time than it should to complete. And what's the deal with all these calls that are “being recorded for quality assurance.” They have the recording and transcript so they KNOW how the call went already.

This is one of the most annoying and intrusive aspects of trying to get anything done in the modern age. According to Creovai’s blog, a contact center management company that counts Noom, Trugreen and City National Bank among their clients, the worth of these questionnaires is questionable. The blog states, “The response rates are dwindling to the single digits, sample bias is skewing the data, and customer service leaders are struggling to extract actionable insights.”

So why are these annoying requests still so prevalent? Are they really giving company officials the intended information to improve services by hearing about customers' experiences?

According to the experts in this field, these surveys are NOT telling them most of their customers’ experience. It is only providing feedback from those people who were motivated in some extreme way to respond and talk about their very own service interaction. It can easily be considered a punitive action aimed at targeting particular employees and creating an atmosphere of risk and reward as if employees were puppies or worse, an opportunity to threaten with or hold punishment over those they employ.

According to one of Creovai’s own corporate customers, “Why do I need to ask my members (customers) about their experience? They told me about it in their conversation.”

And even more important is the simple idea that companies seem to have in expecting and asking customers to care enough about helping their companies to give it more of their time and attention than they already have.Where is the incentive for the stressed out and time-strapped consumer?

Years ago, I both helped moderate focus groups to research both products and ideas. There was always some kind of reward for engaging in these time consuming and only occasionally interesting exercises. But this idea seems to have vanished in the age of “Can I have a minute of your time?” There is nothing offered… not even the idea of entering the participant’s name in a drawing, a raffle or something similar in appreciation of the time taken to answer questions a company should be working on internally.

And this practice is even considered useless by experts. They report 92 percent of customers don’t bother to answer these surveys because they know there is nothing in them for them. They’re correct. Yet these annoying requests continue. I realize it is probably one of these stupid bureaucratic devices used by lazy companies to “measure” employee performance. Everyone knows it doesn’t do this, everyone knows it changes nothing, yet everyone still requests it.

Besides phone calls, I get these kinds of requests on follow-up emails and on the occasional paper receipt I get at retail or grocery stores. Are these companies trying to make me feel empowered as if my opinion really mattered or affects anything? Nah. They’re all just lazy.

So I ask myself, am I the ONLY person annoyed by this? Am I too sensitive or too easily offended or just too focused on “little things?” Is it me, or is it them? Or is it all of us who ignore intrusions and requests for our valuable time?