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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

It seems like it would lose a lot of its effectiveness if the people at the store can see what you rate them.

That’s my experience. Every time I go through Chinese immigration/customs they have these rating smiley buttons but even when my service has been slower than normal I never press the frown button because the person is right there in from of my face watching me. Too awkward.

The setup at immigration has it so the officer can't see what you pushed. Yes you can see them, but they don't know what you pressed -- at least at every Airport in China I've visited.

This 4 scale smily face is pretty common in China, the started over 10 years ago. Even at places like banks and government agencies. They were a key part in how China got it's day to day corruption under control. People would pay bribes for service but leave a poor rating. And while corruption still exists in China, it is no where as in your face or omnipresent as it once was.

No, not really. I think it’s similar to NPS. It’s visible to the store clerks to allow them to correct their mistakes on the spot, instead of having to involve corporate teams. It’s the same idea as the one behind short development cycles. It gets you faster to the goal. And the ultimate goal for the company is to provide good service and not to have another way to evaluate employees.

How could store clerks correct or even understand their mistakes just by seeing a frowny push? The data most likely do go to corporate (which will return to the PoS as retribution), as evidenced by distress seen on the staff's faces when the frowny button was pushed.

NPS is a disaster. Since it's directly tied to financial consequences for staff, (1) staff beg for 10s, (2) anyone who knows how NPS works and has a conscience always gives 10 in order to protect staff from maangemetn abuse.

> How could store clerks correct or even understand their mistakes just by seeing a frowny push?

Because they are humans? Doesn't everybody learn from their mistakes? Some are worse at it than others, sure, but that's what upper layer of data analysis is for...

Yup, classic Skinner Box stuff.

A few quick zaps and the rat will learn pretty quick. But every day it will dread going into the box more and more.

That's just cheap cynicism.

There's also the positive reinforcement from being confirmed as having done a good job.

I've worked as a store clerk. You don't get positive reinforcement for doing a good job. You just get yelled at if you screw up. Or somebody else screws up. Or nobody screwed up but the manager expects you to be superhuman.

That's the point, if there's a HappyOrNot terminal, you do.

A frowny push doesn't tell you what mistake you've made, it forces you to guess what's going through the customer's head.

I never understood why they even bother with 5- or 10-point systems when the only "good" signal is a 10. If that's all you want to collect, just ask me if I was happy or not. Don't give me a bullshit range and hope I know that only the most sparkling of reviews will save the employee I actually like.

Because these people aren't doing NPS, they're doing cargo cult Goodhart management.

NPS has ten steps because that granularity allows you to track improvements even in good teams.

If all you're doing with NPS is taking people out back and shooting them for a 9, then you're missing out on a lot of value.

Doing NPS is impossible, because nobody will use the intermediate ratings.

Besides, people are pretty much incoherent about what is the difference between a 3 and a 7. Some people's 3 are a much higher rank than other people's 7.

Putting 10 options in front of random people is mostly useless. There are very few places where it will lead to meaningful choice.

Netflix documented this pretty well. They also know that a 3 on a Monday means something different than a 3 on Friday night, even from the same person.

These and other things came out of the competition to improve the success rate of the recommendation system.

The NPS scoring I'm familiar with counts 9 or 10 as a +ve, 7 or 8 as neutral and 6 or below as a -ve.

One would imagine they could see the frown on your face, without needing to press a button to show the current state of what you're feeling.

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