this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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i see this all the time with software designed by americans. on an old job we used a tool called "officevibe" where you'd enter your current impression of your role and workplace once a month. you got some random questions to answer on a 10-degree scale.
when we were presented with the result the stats were terrible because the scale was weighted so that everything below 7 was counted as negative. we were all just answering 5 for "it's okay", 3-4 for "could use improvement", and 6-7 for "better than expected". there had never been a 10 in the stats, and the software took that as "this place sucks".
like, of course you downvote a bad response. you're supposed to help the model get better, right?
That happens in Google maps too. A 4 star restaurant is not good. But in Japan, 3 star is the norm, and 5 means exceptionally good.
It makes more sense with restaurant reviews. The business environment is so intensely competitive that any restaurant actually deserving of 1-2 stars would be much more likely to eventually go out of business.
So, over a long enough period of time, you'd wind up with mostly 3-5 star places, with some exceptions existing for restaurants that can survive without the benefit of repeat customers. (tourist trap places, places operated as some kind of money laundering operation, etc)
I once got a call from a telecom marketing department because I rated a customer service agent with a 9 out of 10. When I told them it was not for anything the agent did, just that the store the support was in was extremely difficult to find, the caller got a bit aggressive. Like they expected me to shit talk this poor lady who had been so nice to me, just hard to find, and it was all corpo's fault. The store wasn't properly branded and signaled. She couldn't take any comment that was negative on the company, just on the employee. So I told her how ridiculously stupid that system was. That I wanted to change my score to a perfect ten, comment, the best employee this company has, even better than the CEO. The caller got obviously upset. Told her to write down that if they ever call me again I will immediately cancel my contract. She went with, is there anything else I could help you with? Which is call center code for "I want to hang up".
I once worked for a call center. Customers like you who rate an agent based on things the agent has no control over are the worst. Guaranteed they took employment action on them.
Then they should ask that. The question was redacted as a blanket statement for the entire support experience, which was really good overall. Everything else I rated a 10, including the quality of the attention received. We don't need to make this excuses for bad management practices.
I don't know how the survey question was phrased, only how you wrote your comment, which indicated you rated the agent poorly, not the entire support experience.
9 out of 10 is not poorly. And that is exactly the core of the comment. They saw a 9 and acted as if I was beaten with a bat and verbally abused by this poor lady. This perception is their problem, they are completely out of touch with reality.
I simultaneously disagree with them considering a 9 a failure and your rating the agent less because of something outside of their control.
but as a customer i can't be expected to know that a less-than-stellar review of my customer service experience (which i only contact if i already have issues and therefore am predisposed to be irritated at) will reflect badly on the person who fielded my call unless they explicitly tell me that beforehand, which they won't because that's not information that the customers need and they don't really want to be known for treating their personnel badly.
i may have rated the experience a 9 because the phone tree to get to a human was confusing, or because the hold music was shit, or because the agent had to look things up in the company's slow-ass system so i had to wait. there are a million ways to have a bad time when calling customer service, and if you ask me to rate the experience with one number i would never in a million years give it a 10 unless everything is solved the instant i call.
I hear you on that, and your position makes much more sense now that you've explained their survey wasn't asking the questions well or you misinterpreted them.
Mine had portions for my performance and the overall company's performance separately, but I still received poor ratings (and written comments) for actions other people took that I had no control over, like giving your new dentist a bad rating because you broke a tooth skateboarding before your first visit with them.
"How are your teeth doing?" "Bad."
Versus
"How was your dentist appointment today?" "Good" + "What is your dental history?" "Bad."
now, i'm not the guy that had the original customer service experience you were mad at but that's my experience with them. whenever they're split up i rate the "agent performance" at 100% and everything else at whatever i felt they deserved, because if there's one job that does not deserve more hate its customer service phone jockeys.
but yeah, usually the questions are entirely unfit. our office review thing offered stuff like "i can contribute to my team to further the company's goals". it was a consultancy working on-site with customers. we didn't have teams.
Hey man, listen. Call centers suck. I worked at a call center, and it really really sucked. I'd be the first to empathize with workers locked up in call centers.
But this wasn't even about a call center. It was a support experience survey for going to a physical store that offers support as one of the many things they sell and offer there. The place is not owned by the telecom company, they aren't their employees.
The problem, again, is that the people designing, sending, collecting and overreacting to the support survey probably weren't ever anywhere close to a remotely similar place. Which just shows how utterly useless and pointless the whole exercise is and how it is actually counterproductive to be honest on these corpo surveys.
Recently, saw some survey that explicitly said 1-7 is "poor", 7-8 is "OK", and 9-10 is "great". Wild, not sure what the point of the scale is then.
Same with book ratings. Looking at StoryGraph, the average ratings I see is somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5. While I would rate a decent book a 3.
Born in Eastern Europe, live in the US, maybe that's why.
I wonder if it's like the grading system we use in school? <60% is F for fail, 60% to <70% is D which depending on the class can be barely passing or barely failing. >=70% would be A, B, and C grades which are all usually passing, and A in particular means doing extremely well or perfect (>=90%). I just noticed that that rating scale kind of lines up with the typical American grading scale, maybe that's just a coincidence
most countries i know mark <50% as a failing grade
i was unaware most countries still use this terrible score system at all
Apples and watermelons. The all-time highest major league batting average is only .371, nowhere near .500 which would correspond to 50% of the max possible.
i have no idea what that means or why it's relevant.
I believe you. On a rating scale of 0-10 a value of 5 doesn't usually represent a failure or anything negative, it's usually a middle concept such as "neither like nor dislike". Batting average is another example where 50% isn't a "failing grade". Hope that helps clear it up for you.
no i mean i don't know what a "batting average" is or why it's apples to oranges to compare it to test scores.
i'm assuming you mean that comparing a pure gaussian distribution to a weighted system is unproductive?
From the looks of it, what they're calculating is a net promoter score. The idea is that, in some context, what you actually want to know is whether your target audience would be willing to actually promote your business to their friends and family or not.
It's very common in retail and other competitive markets, because a customer that had an "okay" experience could still go to a competitor, so only customers who had a great experience (7+ out of ten) are actually loyal, returning clients.
Don't know if that's the best method to gather impressions on workplace environment though, I don't think many people would consider their workplace "amazing"