Neil McNicholas: Why ask for a pat on the back for doing your job?

When I completed the purchase of my current car, a process that always seems to take forever, the salesman informed me that I would be receiving an email from the dealership asking me to complete a questionnaire about the quality of the service I had received.

Having just given them £15,000 worth of my business, I would expect to receive the best service they could provide, otherwise I would have taken my custom elsewhere.

I shouldn’t need to then have to take even more of my time completing an on-line form asking me just how well they had done for my £15,000.

More than that, doesn’t the salesman find it slightly embarrassing asking me to tell him how well he had done his job – on top of the commission I have already indirectly paid him and the salary which he will be receiving for doing it?

The same thing happens if you put in a customer service call to a well-known satellite television provider.

As and when and if they are able to fix the problem you have called about, they then notify you that you will be asked to complete a survey asking how satisfied you were with the service you received.

Yes I can appreciate that they may be keen to provide good customer service – and so they should, but surely they can measure that by how many customers they have and how many irate phone calls, emails, and letters of complaint they don’t have. Why the telephonic back-patting?

And so to one of the world’s largest international internet-based commerce companies whose cardboard boxes and packages are being delivered to people’s doors by the million (not all to the same house of course!).

You have no sooner taken delivery of your latest order 
than you receive an email asking you to rate the seller’s performance.

I have never completed one yet but they still keep asking.

I appreciate that as an “umbrella” company they take responsibility for the service provided by their independent sellers, but, as I have said above, that should be reflected in the lack of complaints received rather than asking customers to enthuse over what they had a right to expect and receive anyway in exchange for the cost involved.

Perhaps one of the simplest examples of what I’m talking about, and one that has been around for a while, is these 
inane signs on the rear of commercial vehicles asking 
how well the person behind the wheel is driving and giving a phone number to call.

He or she is a qualified professional driver and should be driving well – it’s their job – and it should be reflected not in how many phone calls their employers receive saying so, but in how many traffic offence notifications they don’t receive from the police.

Oh and yes, this is always a good one. It is still the case, I think, that in most restaurants it is up to the customer whether they leave a tip as a measure of the quality of service they have received – a system that most people support, conscious that those who wait on table are probably being paid minimum wage or are on zero-hour arrangements.

But then we have places like London where 15 per cent (at least) is automatically added to your bill regardless of how good the meal was or how satisfied you are with the service you have received.

A tip (or “gratuity”, literally a “thank you”) was, by definition, something for the customer to choose to give, not for the highway robbing restaurant owner to compulsorily take on the basis that it’s the only way 
the staff are going to receive a decent wage.

You can ask to have the amount deducted from your bill, but that always seems a bit churlish and so most people won’t for that reason. If I want to leave a tip as a “thank you”, that – and the amount – should be up to me.

Quality of customer service is something we have a right to expect, though in this country we have been slow to make our voice be heard in that regard.

At the same time I also think we should acknowledge quality of service as readily as we 
would complain if we didn’t experience it.

But what is this current and constant pursuit of back-patting all about?

Has our society become so devoid of natural expressions of gratitude and appreciation that they have to be prised out 
of people?