Your Rating
System Gets Zero Stars
Lyft
and other companies want you to tell them about your experience--as long you
have something nice to say.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
As if
Lyft didn't have enough grief these days with all the talk about the shabby
treatment of its drivers, I had another interesting ride experience that raised
a couple of additional red flags. The whole new "trust" economy -
where we invite strangers into our homes, do business with sellers we'll
never see, and put ourselves and our kids into cars with drivers we hope aren't
dangerous or deadbeats - depends almost entirely on our belief in the
aggregated and unbiased wisdom of the crowd. Some of that wisdom takes
the form of ratings systems regarding products, services and people, designed
to reassure us about the folks we're dealing with. This is especially critical
with ridesharing because we know the two main players do next to nothing to
satisfy us about the quality and capabilities of their drivers. But, even
worse, what if the ratings we rely on are being gamed to the point of
uselessness because they're constructed to make everyone smell like a rose?
Just asking.
In any
event, I had a bumpy but decent Lyft ride recently and, as I left the cab, I
got a message from Lyft reminding me to tip and rate the driver. I selected the
tip and then clicked on a 4-star rating (out of 5) because there were a few
hair-raising turns, some startling swerves, and a couple of abrupt stops in my
short journey, which I thought didn't make for a 5-star trip. Still, I wasn't
really trying to knock the driver. Because I believe that drivers who work 14
hours a day to earn next to nothing for all their "gigging" don't
need any crappy comments from me. But I thought I was being asked for my
opinion and that the rating was appropriate to briefly reflect my own
experience. And, by the way, then I wanted to quickly get on with my life.
So,
imagine my surprise when my 4-star rating spawned a multi-headed survey about
what was wrong with my trip. All kinds of questions that I had no real interest
in dealing with. Was the driver this or that? Were there other issues? Did I
need help? Frankly, I was simply trying to leave a tip, not deliver a treatise
on customer service. And here's where things got a little tricky. I couldn't
seem to simply leave the tip and close out the inquiry without responding to
the survey. It was a little bit like trying to rate a book on your Kindle
without leaving an accompanying comment. Of course, if I changed the rating to
a 5-star, I was free to go. But anything less than ideal was an invitation to
write an essay rather than making a quick exit.
I had
the feeling, knowing human nature and how we're all in a hurry these days, that
whoever at Lyft designed this "user experience" would be perfectly
happy to "train" us to just "go for the gold" (click the
5-star rating) so we could quickly escape. Makes for nice ratings results and
great bragging rights -- although it doesn't really tell you anything of value
about what's really going on. This is a lot like websites that continue to rely
on clickbait
and other cheap tricks to drive meaningless traffic.
The
Lyft ratings system is playing off the exact same hurry-up mindset and
ingrained behaviors that have quickly taught us to accept and acknowledge the
consents and boilerplate Ts & Cs (terms and conditions) that we quickly
click on at a million different sites, knowing full well that we haven't read
or even taken away the slightest idea of what we just automatically and
thoughtlessly agreed to. We do the same mindless and robotic actions when we
like and share social media stuff that we absolutely haven't read but are so
happy to pass on to our own universe of friends as an invitation to waste more
of their time. But I digress.
Honestly,
in the moment, I could have lived with a quick-click response, but I wasn't interested
in a quiz. And, of course, if I was really in a hurry, I could have simply
bagged the whole thing and not left a tip, which only ends up screwing the
driver. Anyone who has ever abandoned an online shopping cart knows the feeling
and the frustration. Ask too much of me, take too long, and I will happily take
a hike.
So, in
addition to encouraging essentially irrelevant but overwhelmingly affirmative
feedback, a poorly designed survey system (which won't let you opt out) would
likely end up costing the drivers money. And it wouldn't do anything material
to weed out the drivers who actually needed to be doing something else. Maybe
this was just an instance of sloppy design rather than something more
malicious. But it sucked, in any case.
And this
whole situation reminded me of the many years I spent with car dealers who
tried all kinds of incentives (free car washes, giveaways, special events,
etc.) to encourage recent customers to return the dealer satisfaction surveys
they would be receiving directly from the manufacturers so the dealers could
"help" correctly complete them. You can just imagine how favorably
the surveys turned out for the dealers who were answering the questions about
their sales and service themselves.
Of
course, this made the results suspect, but I think the message that the
customers got from the whole manipulative process was far more damaging. If the
dealers' actions were basically saying that no one really cared about the
customers' honest opinions and evaluations and that the paperwork was just a
game they had to play to placate the manufacturers, then why would the
customers conclude anything but that the dealers were probably just as happy to
try to put something over on them as well.
There's
an old adage that still rings so true: people who will lie for you will
eventually lie to you. These aren't people worth doing business with under any
circumstances. Entrepreneurs often find themselves walking the thin line
between the hard truth and the little white lies. But for the
people who want to go the distance, the choices are always quite clear because
everything you do and all the choices you make are important part of your
company's culture.
If you
tell the truth, you move ahead, and it becomes part of your past. If you lie,
you live with it every day, and it becomes part of your future.
