This essay/rant is about instances of commerce wherein you receive goods and/or services. I shall divide them into two groups…
Type 1 is when you merely order something and you receive it with no human interaction. I click what I have to click to get Amazon to send me a book or a piece of electronics equipment or a life-size bronze statue of Gene Rayburn and soon after, the book or the piece of electronics equipment or the life-size bronze statue of Gene shows up on my front porch…or doesn't.
Type 2 involves some discernible action by a representative of the company with whom I speak or whose name is given to me so I know who is doing whatever they're doing for me. Here are some examples of what I am calling Type 2 cases…
- I have to talk to someone at my cable company about why I am not getting all the channels for which I pay.
- I have to have someone from the cable company come to my home to fix the problem that the person at the cable company could not fix from there.
- A service like Grubhub or DoorDash sends someone to a restaurant to pick up an order and bring it to me.
- I go into a store and a person there waits on me or rings up my purchases.
…and you can probably imagine other examples but you can see the difference. Yes, someone in a Type 1 transaction fills my order and wraps up the statue of Gene but I don't see that person, I don't talk with that person, I don't know where that person is or who they are, etc.
These days, almost every time I have a Type 2 transaction, I get a little e-mail, often with the subject line "Tell Us How We Did," asking me to rate my experience. But that's not really what they ask me to rate. I'm usually being asked to rate the one person I dealt with, who is usually the last person in the whole process and often, the least important.
And in many cases, I suspect, the one being paid the least and/or the easiest one for the company to replace.
Example: The other day, I ordered some supper from a meal delivery service…and a neat thing about many of these services is that you can monitor the process on an app or your home computer screen. I got the notice that the restaurant was starting to prepare my order. Then I got the notice that the kid making minimum wage delivering for them was en route to the restaurant. Then I could look online and see that he was waiting there for my order…and waiting and waiting…
The initial notice that my order was accepted said it would be here between 7:10 and 7:20. But at 7:20, the kid was, according to the app, still waiting at the restaurant for it. He got it at 7:25 and I received it at 7:45, which meant he came directly here as swiftly as the speed limits would allow. Then the company sent me one of those "Tell Us How We Did" e-mails and asked me to rate only the kid.
There was no spot to complain about their app, which I found a bit confusing…no place to rate the quality of the food, which you'd think might matter somehow to someone…no place to write, "The order was 25 to 35 minutes late but that might have been the fault of the restaurant, not the delivery kid." It could even have been the fault of the software or hardware involved in conveying my order to the restaurant.
But they were just asking me to rate the kid. Maybe I'm assuming too much but I figure anyone doing this kind of work needs the money and there isn't much of it even with us generous tippers. They probably all have lot of things they'd rather be doing for a living but they can't get that work, maybe because of The Pandemic…
I don't want someone to say, "That's the fifth complaint about an order handled by this delivery kid. Cut him loose!"?
I don't want to fault the delivery person when it's not his or her fault. I do sometimes want to fault the company that employs them. When I call my cable company with a problem — as I have to do, way too often — the "Tell Us How We're Doing" questionnaire I receive after we're done gives me no place to complain about the long hold time, no place to complain about my calls dropping, no place to complain about how often I find myself calling to complain. All they want to know is how was the person I spoke to? Were they polite? They're always polite.
Did they solve my problem? Often, the correct answer to that would be "No, the problem is with your equipment and even though they knew what they were doing, it wasn't within their power to fix!!!" But there's nowhere I can enter that. I have to rate the person I spoke to on a scale of 1 to 5…and that's it. I wish some company would ask me to evaluate their evaluation system. To start with, how do I explain I never got my life-size bronze statue of Gene Rayburn?