When the satisfaction survey arrived in my inbox, I felt stuck. I had just completed my eighth call to customer support for the same unresolved issue. The survey asked me to rate my most recent interaction.

Customer support was friendly, knowledgeable, and efficient. They created another ticket to reiterate the problem and “elevated” the issue to the correct department (once again).

The trouble was—my problem remained unsolved.

Our mortgage company had failed to pay our property taxes months earlier. The money was in escrow—the company just needed to send it.

Coordinating that message turned into a monumental task.

What made this so challenging?

The company’s broken processes, insufficient quality controls, disconnected systems, and groups that didn’t talk to each other.

I was surprised to learn they couldn’t talk to each other. The group that needed to send our payment—the tax department—didn’t have a phone number. All messages had to go through a slow internal system.

Could I rate the CEO and executive team instead of customer support?

No one asked me to rate the leadership team, but it would have been a much better question. The company did not understand the source of their problems.

I skimmed the survey questions, noting how each zeroed in on the support rep. And now I had a choice to make:

• give a negative rating because I was tired of trying to get the company to solve a problem they created, or
• give a positive rating because I knew customer support was doing their best in the middle of a flawed system.

Negative or positive…neither rating would convey the full experience nor the real issue.