Dear Recent Interaction Survey,

It seems that you want my help making a personnel decision?

Sadly, I have little to say about the agent who answered my phone, email, or chat inquiry. They appeared to be a competent human. If I was unknowingly interacting with an LLM, you did a great job fine-tuning it. While I’d have preferred someone with forensic troubleshooting skill and deep knowledge of your systems, I understand that organizations move such people far away from the general public.

You didn’t ask, but I often have feedback about the service itself that your (hospital network, airline, car insurance company, etc.) delivers.

Which aspect of the customer experience caused me to initiate a customer service interaction? Could you make a positive-sum change to your socio-technical systems and processes to avert such situations in the future? If you can’t eliminate the problem, can you make its solution obviously self-service?

Do your engineering and operations teams test-drive the firm’s own customer experience? Do they have both the slack to notice opportunities like these, and the freedom to actually make changes?

I fear that, by framing your questions in terms of the person who I interacted with, you are transmuting any problem I have with your organization’s service into a problem with a named low-status employee. This human, constrained by your systems, doesn’t deserve the blame.