Customer-Service Ratings Aren’t Just Useless — They’re Unfair to Workers Too

They’re loaded with bias and an insult to the human spirit

The other day I went to the Apple store to buy a power adaptor for a MacBook Air.

I made an appointment online, showed up, and an employee cheerily and promptly gave me the adaptor. We chitchatted briefly. I paid for it and left.

And then I got this email from Apple asking me to rate the employee…

(I obscured the employee’s name to protect her privacy.)

Every time I’m asked to do this, I feel like a complete bag of dirt. There’s something decidedly icky — if extremely swipe-left modern — about being asked to ponder a human being with whom you just interacted for perhaps 30 seconds, and, in a snap judgment, reduce them to a single five-point-scale.

Yet it’s become a very common and frankly blasé occurrence, right? Nearly every time we interact with a service worker these days, their company asks us to rate them. We’re asked to rate Lyft drivers, bathroom-stall cleaners, delivery folks, baristas, and the entire host of people we interact with commercially. Our phones and browsers are full of intergalactic corporations constantly pleading with us to assign one-to-five stars to their already-overworked-and-underpaid frontline workers.

Any normal person can see this is morally loathsome.

But what about on a practical level? Is it even a good way to figure out how your company is doing?

LOL. Rhetorical question! It’s a dreadful way to figure out how your company is doing, since the ratings don’t even work; they do not even achieve the already-dubious purposes for which they were originally ginned up. They’re just a corporate zombie-creation that keeps lurching along, knocking over lamps and moaning, while making the lives of employees flat-out miserable.

Here’s a brief list — by no means conclusive! — that explains why the practice of having your customers rate your employees needs to die, die, and die…