The other day, while on a website for a company I do regular business with, I was prompted to give feedback on my assigned representative. It was your typical zero-to-five-star scale measuring a handful of different aspects of the service rendered. Now, I really, really like this particular person. He’s been with me through some difficult situations, and would have to do an awful lot to lose my business. I gave him five stars in every category but one, where I gave him four–and part of my reasoning for the deduction was the fear his superiors might think I make him look too perfect.
Later on I was speaking with this person, and he thanked me for the positive review, but then focused almost entirely on the four-star category as if I had intended it as criticism, when in my mind the four other five-stars were intended as high praise.
I’ve noticed this in a lot of places. For me you really have to be spectacular to earn five stars. For much the rest of the world, apparently, you only give less than five stars if they did something wrong. To me, if I give everything five stars I leave no room for anyone to come along and completely blow me away with their awesomeness! I almost never give a book five stars on Goodreads. I only give five stars on online orders if the company/product exceeded my expectations by a significant margin. You don’t get five stars from me if you simply deliver according to expectations.
But I increasingly feel I’m alone in this. I have a business partner who gets anxious if our store’s cumulative rating starts creeping toward 4.5, and perhaps he’s right to be concerned, since it seems so easy to earn a five-star rating these days. On the other hand, we did set out deliberately to create a store with customer service second-to-none, or at least significantly better than our competition. My partner takes this very seriously, and I know he is quite capable of delivering 5-star service in all but the most trying circumstances.
So who knows, perhaps the problem really is just with me. Perhaps all these ratings should be split in two. The first rating would be for the person/business being evaluated as normal, but the second would be a rating for the evaluator: how difficult are you to impress? I’d probably have to give myself five stars.