Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom! My little anecdote for the week, I think I want to focus on spring! There were a couple of warm days this week and it was actually feeling like springtime. So to try to look forward to something, what are some of your favorite activities to do when spring finally kicks in?
And now, let us get into the real news of the day and that is what happened at the office!
You will recall that last week, Michael had gone with Holly to her new place in Nashua, where she was being relocated to. When Michael returned, he looked very emotional and revealed to us that he proposed to her and they were engaged to be married! Naturally, we wanted to know all of the details and how his family was taking it, but he hadn’t even told his mom yet. We forced him to call her while we were there, so we could hear her excitement, and instead we all got a fair amount of disappointment. Turns out, they actually broke up but Michael couldn’t face telling us the truth. I do wonder how long he would have gone with this if we hadn’t forced it out of him.
Aside from this disappointing news, this week was the reveal of our annual customer surveys. Kelly Kapoor, in customer service, goes around to all our clients to get feedback on the sales team. Ensures that everyone is doing a good job, and these scores directly impact their annual bonus so it is pretty important to do a good job.
Customer surveys are by no means confined just to Dunder Mifflin and are used across nearly all industries. Where it varies is the type of information being collected as obviously, each industry is a bit different. In my personal line of work in Human Resources, I know that customer surveys are sent out based around my work and I have also seen these surveys go out having also been a “customer” for my department. The questions essentially trying to ask if my questions were answered fully, conducted in a timely manner, do I feel the person assigned did a satisfactory job, and so on. But rather than a yes or no, we use a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being no/bad and 5 being yes/good) to provide a range for the review. While our reviews do not impact my pay, they are certainly watched to ensure I continue to do appropriate work. Not to brag but I have only ever seen low reviews come through when there was obviously a misunderstanding on the survey. Across a number of colleagues we have seen ratings of 1 accompanied by “Great Job!” so we assume they simply missed updating the scale. Our surveys are sent out as an optional task when their cases are closed out, as for the healthcare side of our company I have also received surveys after an appointment. I have seen two kinds, often there will be an email that is sent out to complete, and I have even had calls from actual representatives. So there are many options to setting up customer reviews and regardless of the industry, I do feel they are important to evaluate not only your product, but to also get feedback on your staff.
Back to Scranton, we were all in for some pretty wild results. Dwight and Jim actually received terrible reviews, which is wild because our branch has some of the best sales staff in the company. Dwight is livid and refuses to accept the results, adamant that this is somehow tied to sabotage. While he is pretty intense, he truly does put his customers and sales above anything else. Jim’s response was a bit more subdued, and he assumed that maybe he really was a bit lax with his professionalism and accepted the results.
Not one to allow any such failure, Michael quickly lines up a training between the three of them to try to address these issues. For people new to sales, it is by no means a bad thing to practice. While Dwight was all for taking it seriously, Jim immediately sees it as a chance to pull one of his “Jim Pranks” to mess with Dwight. I say Jim but in this case he was going by Bill Buttlicker over the phone. There are a number of qualities that go into sales and while some are naturally charismatic and can go for the sale, for many of us it can be difficult so if you are struggling with certain skills, then work on them! This mock phone call is a tool that many companies use, so if practicing making sales with your friends and family help, then do it.
Having not really accomplished anything with this, Jim does head out to try to resolve the issues with Dwight. But Dwight is not letting up with this strong believe that there is more to the story than just bad reviews and yells at Kelly over his paranoia. Jim dismisses him, until he starts to notice that perhaps he isn’t crazy after all. He was talking with Kelly and she barely gives him the time of day, which is odd considering how talkative she is. While talking with Ryan he notices that all through the the office people are using special coffee mugs with their face on them. As it turns out, Jim didn’t attend Kelly’s America’s Got Talent finale party where these were party favors. For one of the few times ever, Jim decides Dwight was right and even admitted to him he agrees with the sabotage theory.
After calling their clients and showing the results to Michael, they confront Kelly about the incident and she quickly folds. She was upset because they didn’t attend her party so she chose to distort the date and get them into trouble over the survey scores. We all assume Kelly would get fired because she clearly broke several company rules including fraud. Michael connects with her on some weird level but I stand by the fact that she should have gotten in serious trouble because what she did goes way beyond stealing someone’s lunch or putting their calculator in gelatin because those scores could have had some big consequences for Jim and Dwight. Kelly has revealed herself she is not one to upset so I think it best to keep my eye on her.
And that was the Breakdown today! I would love to know from people if you have any insight into customer surveys? Advise for implementing them into your small business? It would also be nice to know how many people out there actually fill them out. I do my best because I know it can help employees who I felt did a good job, but not everyone takes the time to do them.
As always, I hope you all have a great weekend, and I’ll be sure to see you around the Breakroom!
