When Support Teams are Blamed for Product Problems
Small injustices can hold disproportionate emotional weight. The parking ticket when the sign was incredibly confusing. The birds rioting outside your window on your long-awaited day to sleep in.
Or getting a poor rating for your customer service performance when it is the product itself that the customer is actually unhappy with. It feels so unfair to cop the blame for something entirely outside your control, particularly if your job performance is measured using those same satisfaction ratings.
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Customers are not (for the most part) doing it maliciously. They have been given an opportunity to share their opinion, and they are not required to make a careful distinction between the company, the product or service, and the person serving them. And that is reasonable.
What we call a “brand” is really just the combination of all of those elements. In my experience, support teams are happy to take the upside of a strong brand— they rarely complain about getting high ratings for their service when customers just love the product.
In reality you can’t disentangle the service experience from the sales and marketing and product experiences. They all influence each other. They set, reinforce, or break expectations.
We can try to measure just the service elements by carefully wording the survey question and by associating it more closely in time with a particular service experience, but that will always be approximate at best.
All metrics are ultimately just a shadow of reality. They are useful but imperfect indicators of what is actually happening in the world. The deeper solution is to create an environment of trust, where it is safe to acknowledge the reality that some poor service ratings are really about the product or the company and not the individual team member — as are some great ratings.
In a customer-centric company, it should be safe to talk honestly about the customer experience as a whole and to work together to improve it without laying blame unfairly.
