It gives them incentive to help customers, I suppose. I generally get good service and give appropriately good ratings.

On the occasions where I get assigned a clown, I have no problem giving the appropriate rating there either.

I agree.

However:

(1) Most of the times, the problem does not get solved, requiring follow ups, but the surveys do not allow for marking that. This allows the representatives to set the problem aside without resulting in negative feedback for them.

(2) Many times, the representatives are helpless in solving the problem which has its roots in company's policies. (E.g., deletion of older digital statements in the OP). Giving a poor rating to the representative would not solve the real problem.

Both of the above can be fixed by having more options in the survey, but they don't include them.

If I do those I just give glaring reviews so as to possibly relieve some small bit of human suffering.

My brother worked at a major telecom call center as recently as last year, and for them the survey let you rate them something like 1-5. But anything under 5 was a "failure" and they were only allowed a few failures per day without repercussions. So fun.

If you agree to the survey, do you get bumped higher in the queue? I’ve always wondered.

Nope. You don't.

How do you know that?

I've implemented/maintained several. Call centers are one of those things you try to keep as simple as possible. Generally speaking, you've either got one big ole call center where anyone could take any caller at any time, or more specialized deals where the call center is divided into teams who are partitioned across the set of dial in numbers you prearrange the phone company to route.

To get your metrics right, you don't want your queues doing weird things, because it's hard enough making sure you have enough bodies to keep the queue times short enough your customers will even bother.

I put particular emphasis on getting my Call Center people exactly what they need to do their jobs quickly, because I don't see them as sunk cost, but an incestment in customer goodwill. Present a good face to the public, and be able to handle their problems, and they will either stick around or come back.

It's an interesting piece of technology to set up and QA. The meeting of telephony and Internet is a section of tech I like to dabble in, because phones are cool.

Neat, thanks for the interesting perspective. You mentioned you invest in your CS because you don't see it as a sunk cost. How were you able to convince the execs to give you money to do this? Sounds like a huge challenge

And surely it is different for each company?

Oh yes. Totally different based on whether a company's execs hate customer service.

I'm not one of those of those though. I like my CS people to be able to do their jobs to keep the inevitable discruption to a customer's day minimized.

In the place I'm at, my Call Center is one of the happiest groups in the company. So many other places I've been that wasn't the case, do I made damn sure to deliver the best impl possible when I got the chance to oversee it.

I think you mean glowing

I did. LOL