What do you think about customer service people telling you to give them all excellents on surveys?

The car dealerships take those surveys seriously. Anything less than an excellent is considered bad. It really does suck. Guys can get fired over it.
They also effect the dealers standing with the manufacturer.
Also, no returned review is a negative.
I always give them excellent a unless they do something especially bad.

@Judi It’s stupid. So, they will never know how to improve, because customers don’t want their sales guy to get in trouble? Terrible system.

My custom is to mark excellent on everything if I’m reasonably satisfied with the service. If there’s a real problem, I speak directly to my service manager and/or dealership manager about it and not submit the survey until I AM satisfied.

Perhaps you could abstain, I’ve never answered a survey that was compulsory.

Yes!! I had a similar reaction at a car dealership recently. I took my car in for some maintenance at about 9am, and they said it would take 3 hours. They offered me a ride home but I had my baby with me and I didn’t want to take out the carseat, reinstall it in their car, then reinstall it back in my car (we had it installed professionally and it was a big pain). My husband could have come to get me during lunch but he would have gotten there at 12pm and that’s when I would be finished anyway. So I told them I would just wait, and I walked around for 3 hours and did some errands.

I got back to the dealership and…they said it would be another 2 hours!!! If they had just said that up front I would have asked my husband to come get me and take me home.

After all that, when I finally got my car back (more than 5 hours later), the service guy told me to make sure to answer “excellent” on the survey I would be getting. He was so nice about everything, I wish I could have, but it wasn’t excellent! And then I never got a survey anyway.

I would take it as a challenge to give an extra bad review.

@nikipedia That is terrible customer service! They should have called you to say it would be longer than 3 hours. I’m so sick of places not calling to give “bad” news, like they hope it goes unnoticed. This happened to me all the time in TN, not with car dealers so much, but many other places. I hope it doesn’t happen here in westcentral FL.

I’ve been told that they only get ‘credit’ for the highest rating… If the scale is 1–5, only 5 counts. The more 5s they get, the more support they get from the manufacturer.

I hate when they ask for the highest rating. And I tell them that I will decide my response based on the actual service I have received. Funny thing is, I no longer get survey solicitations.

@hearkat That’s ridiculous too. So, they don’t ask you to fill surveys anymore because they can’t trust you will give all 5’s. This is like the public school debate in America. Attaching teacher pay to student performance.

My last experience at a dealer they exceeded my expectations on one front, but there was one thing that I feel they could have done better on. If I wrote it up it would be to suggest a better way of doing it, and should not be seen as a bad mark, but rather an informative one. Whole thing is stupid.

They can ask. That doesn’t tie me into answering the way that they want.

I think the same thing as I do of students who ask me to give them A’s. They’ll get the score they deserve, and pleading does nothing to improve their case. I’m open to an explanation of how the company interprets the scores, but not to begging.

@nikipedia I had a very similar experience the last time I got my car inspected. They kept saying it would be done any minute—for three hours. Just tell me it’s going to take some time! Then I can go and do something productive!