Evaluating customer service employees after each call is a “falsification of reality.”

Dealers with service centers and entities reported that they face urgency and psychological pressure from customer service employees to evaluate their performance after every phone experience, and some of them “beg” to choose the highest grade.

They called for obliging the employees of these agencies to leave the freedom of participation to the customer, and to develop measurement tools that reflect the employee’s actual performance, especially since in many cases the customer is asked to give a high rating even though his problem has not been solved, which is a falsification of reality.

Corporate Innovation Advisor, Ahmed Shahrouj, confirmed that insisting on the client to participate in the evaluation, and directly asking him to choose the highest grade, reveals a flaw in the measurement philosophy itself, calling on smart entities to improve the service and innovate new procedures to measure the performance of their employees.

In detail, those dealing with various service agencies and centers observed the growing phenomenon of “urgency” practiced by some customer service employees to obtain high ratings after each telephone experience.

This phenomenon is known as “survey begging” or “gaming the system.”

It is a reflection of a “flawed” institutional culture, in which reward or job security is directly linked to the highest grades.

Aida Khaled said: “At the end of every call with customer service, I always face a request from the employee to participate in evaluating his performance, which is something that can be done easily by sending a text message or email. However, there is a phenomenon that has begun to spread widely during the recent period, which is the insistence on requesting participation in the evaluation and choosing the highest grade, under the pretext of supporting and helping the employee, which is a negative indicator in dealing with service agencies.”

Abdullah Muhammad said that he was surprised, in several cases, by employees’ requests to choose the highest evaluation for his performance, even though his problem, which he called about, was not resolved, adding that he gave a high evaluation to the employee out of courtesy and sympathy for him, because one of them assured him that receiving a low evaluation would negatively affect his salary or performance bonus.

Abu Hazza stressed the importance of evaluating the employee’s performance in relation to his ability to solve the problem, and not to respond to the customer. He suggested that the relevant authorities intervene to set strict standards and controls that reflect their actual performance.

Corporate Innovation Advisor, Ahmed Shahrouj, told Emirates Today that the problem in some service centers is no longer limited to the employee urging the customer to participate in the evaluation, or directly asking him to choose the highest grade, but rather it reveals a deeper flaw in the measurement philosophy itself.

He explained that when the evaluation turns into a tool for psychological pressure on the customer, or into a means by which the employee tries to protect his salary from deductions, we are not facing a system that measures the quality of service, but rather we are facing a system that pushes everyone to produce a high number that does not reflect the truth.

He continued: “In this case, the party not only loses the credibility of the indicators, but also loses the opportunity to understand the real flaw in the experiment and address it from its roots.”

He stated that “old signals” related to satisfaction are no longer read in the same way in the new environment affected by social media and behavioral shifts, which requires reconsidering how they are used.

He stressed that recent studies not only say that some of the current practices are annoying to the customer, but also indicate that being satisfied with one satisfaction indicator or an evaluation score after the call is no longer sufficient or accurate. In the Qualtrics

In other words, the organization may get a good evaluation at the end of the call, while in reality the customer is less confident, less willing to make a recommendation, and less willing to continue with it. This shows that some parties are still chasing a comfortable administrative number, but it is no longer sufficient to understand the experience as it should be.

He stressed that smart agencies are required to devise new procedures to measure performance, and this does not mean complicating indicators, but rather moving from measuring “what did the client say under pressure?” To measure: “Is the problem really solved?” How much effort did the client put in? What is the root cause of stumbling? What emotional impact did the experience leave? He saw that this transformation has become more urgent, because modern literature in the field of customer satisfaction is moving towards broader topics such as well-being, transformative service, and artificial intelligence, instead of being satisfied with simplified traditional models.

He stressed that there are more beneficial alternatives than pinning the employee’s fate on the “highest rating,” and the first of these alternatives is the solution index from “Awal Communication,” because recent data indicates that customers whose problems are solved the first time become almost twice as likely to trust, recommend, and purchase at a rate of nearly double.

The second is the “customer effort” indicator, which measures the ease with which the customer obtains the service or solution, and is more useful than a quick impressionistic question at the end of the call.

The third is to “analyze the reasons” for the decrease in satisfaction or negative feelings through artificial intelligence, and the analysis of calls and texts, so that the entity does not stop at the level, but rather knows why it decreased and exactly where the stumble occurred.

He also pointed out that recent trends call for measuring the emotional impact of the experience, because analyzes conducted on hundreds of scores showed that emotion predicts loyalty to a better degree than measures of career success or effort alone. Therefore, the real treatment of the phenomenon is not by directing employees to request evaluation in a gentler way, but rather by redesigning the entire measurement system.

He stressed that what is required is for the entity to separate the evaluation of the individual employee from the failures resulting from the complexity of procedures, the slowness of systems, or conflicts of authority, and to make multidimensional indicators an actual solution to the problem. Only then does evaluation become a real improvement tool, not a begging tool, and innovation in procedures becomes part of justice for the employee, greater honesty with the customer, and higher maturity in managing the service experience.