
Please don’t rate your waitress 4/5 - thisisit
https://medium.com/@leftoutside/please-dont-rate-your-waitress-4-5-1f19ef3c09f8
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mft_
The article ignores that sometimes, feedback is necessary.

I had a Lyft ride recently where the driver drove a car I believed to be
unroadworthy, deliberately ignored the sat-nav adding 10+ minutes onto a short
journey, and deliberately ran a red light (possibly because they didn't want
to brake moderately hard, due to the aforementioned unroadworthiness).

Now, I'm all for not trying to interfere with someone's livelihood, and have
given quite poor Uber/Lyft drivers 5* in the past for that reason, but this
can also sometimes a necessary feedback route. Trying to prevent this either
via guilt, or because of this idea that engaging with the feedback system lets
companies minimise other forms of better management, is ultimately preventing
legitimate and sometimes very necessary feedback.

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Totoradio
I think the article is more about the fact that 5* covers every experience
from "slightly below average but not enough that I want to crush my driver
livelihood" to "This was the better ride of my life, bar none" and everything
in between.

Doing so, it's mostly useful to employers and not to users. The only case
where it's useful to both is the case you describe, the obvious 1* ratings.

~~~
cpkpad
To be fair, the system works pretty well on the whole. One of the reasons I
switch to Uber/Lyft because of the extreme attention on customer service.
Drivers are very motivated to keep customers happy. That's a big difference to
cab rides.

I've had many one-star cab rides (joy ride several times as long, verbally
abusive, etc.). I've only had one bad experience on a Lyft/Uber. But the
quality of the typical experience is much higher too.

It's imperfect, but I think the problem is more with:

* unreasonable performance thresholds; * misuse of statistical significance; * use of data in isolation; and * misuse of data

The other issues described mostly wash out after a few hundred rides. On the
other hand, automatically firing people who fall below 4.6 stars without so
much as a conversation is a little bit insane. On the other hand, many human
managers do things which are insane too; nothing's perfect.

On the whole, eBay has been pretty reliable for me due to ratings, but I did
get cheated twice because of similar misuse.

In one case, I ordered a premium item for about 50 bucks. They sent a low-end
item which costs about 10 bucks. It wasn't obvious; for the most part, people
wouldn't realize it until months later. Most ratings were high, with maybe 1
in 100 people pointing out the item was not as advertised.

eBay wasn't concerned. Credit card required an expert appraisal. Federal trade
commission doesn't deal with this sort of thing. Seller appeared to be raking
in about $500k per year profit on fraud. After no one cared, I decided to
follow eBay's, credit card's, and FTC's lead, and say that for $50, it wasn't
worth my time either.

But I stopped shopping for anything which could be forged on eBay (chemicals,
fabrics, materials, jewelry, SD cards, etc.).

If eBay combined normal mechanisms with ratings, it'd be pretty easy to stay
reliable. Alibaba does this -- there's a real conflict resolution process.

~~~
arbie
eBay almost always sides with the buyer when a claim is filed.

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Anderkent
Well, rating someone 4/5 is only a problem if everyone else rates 5/5 for
merely acceptable service. So perhaps we should evangelise for lower ratings,
rather than squeeze everyone into 5/5?

~~~
to_bpr
Absolutely.

It's in this vein that I rate 3* as a base (get me from A-B without crashing
or similar incident) and go up/down from there based on the overall
experience.

There's people in this thread stating they've given drivers who've provided
bad or unacceptable service 5*, just because. It is, as you state, this
behaviour which is the root of the problem in these systems.

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hansthehorse
After every service at my Honda dealer the service writer reminds me that if I
get a survey from American Honda anything less than a 10 rating in any
category is a failure.

~~~
kwhitefoot
My reaction to that might be to rate the service at zero and then get my
servicing done elsewhere accompanied by an email to Honda complaining about
it.

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jhayward
I'm sorry, someone else's psychosis (the bizarre interpretation of a scale) is
not my problem and I refuse to adopt their derangement. You'll get an
accurate, honest rating from me, or none if that's an option. Otherwise I'm
being coerced in to a lie and I don't deal with coercion very well.

Holding a gun to the service workers head and claiming that I'll kill them if
I don't rate them FANTASTIC!! isn't an argument.

~~~
ksk
Right, this same psychosis affects everyone, and nobody is exempt from the
effect either.

"Please rate our new iOS App" → no bonus for you

"Please rate our new redesigned webpage" → no bonus for you

"Please take a customer satisfaction survey on our new product" → No promotion
for you

"Rate me on elance/upwork" → no more work for you

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parliament32
> The rush to rate every experience and interaction has much the same effect.
> The ever present manager monitoring your output is a reality and we’re all
> involved.

This exact problem was explored in a Black Mirror episode, where every
interaction was rated with a star system:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive)

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gmiller123456
I'd say the biggest problem with relying customer ratings is that once
customer's learn how valuable they are, some customers will exploit it to try
to get more than they deserve.

Without consistency the ratings are pretty worthless. You need someone who
will honestly rate the employee based on the value they provide to the
business, and the business is the only entity that can do that.

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jacques_chester
Oh yes, this stuff drives me nuts.

A good takedown was written about the Net Promoter Score[0], but the
principles are generally applicable to any one of these idiotic schemes.

[0] [https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-
harmf...](https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-
what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it/)

~~~
gota
At least Uber stars are about something that _happened_ , not something
hypothetical. This point:

    
    
      As you can see, Dan’s 9 NPS data points vary, from 5 up to
      10. What this data doesn’t tell us is whether the   
      respondent ever did what the question asked. We don’t know 
      if they recommended the company to a friend or colleague.
    

alone would be enough to discard NPS, even disregarding the kinda moronic
11-point scale reduced to 'upvote-downvote' via arbitrary cutoff

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stealthmodeclan
We use intercom. How can we add a customer service representative rating
system?

