The User's Unfair Trade Offer
Description
This meme uses the popular 'Trade Offer' format, which originated on TikTok. It features a man in a business suit against a purple-lit background, presenting a proposition. At the top, a red banner reads 'TRADE OFFER'. The offer is split into two columns: 'i receive: Flawless support' on the left, and 'you receive: 1 star survey' on the right. The man is labeled 'User'. The meme humorously and painfully captures the frustration of IT support, helpdesk staff, and on-call developers. It highlights a scenario where a technical professional provides a perfect solution to a user's problem, only for the user to inexplicably leave the worst possible rating on a satisfaction survey. This is a deeply relatable experience for those whose performance is judged by user feedback metrics (like CSAT or NPS), which often fail to reflect the quality of the support given
Comments
8Comment deleted
Our ticketing system has two states: 1) ticket is open and the user is unhappy, or 2) ticket is closed and the user leaves a 1-star CSAT score. There is no success state
We hit five nines and sub-second MTTR, yet the user still drops a one-star because the confirmation email hit “Promotions” - turns out CSAT is the hardest distributed system
After 20 years in tech, I've learned that the probability of getting a 5-star review is inversely proportional to the number of hours spent resolving edge cases in their legacy SOAP integration that was 'working fine yesterday' despite not being touched since 2011
This perfectly captures the SLA paradox: you can have 99.99% uptime, sub-minute response times, and resolve issues before the user even finishes typing their ticket, but that one time you politely asked them to clear their cache? One star. 'Would not recommend.' Meanwhile, your performance review is tied to CSAT scores, and management wonders why the support team has a thousand-yard stare during sprint retrospectives
We hit all the SLOs and closed the ticket in 5 minutes; CSAT: 1★ - “there shouldn’t be bugs.” Cool, I’ll backlog the “abolish entropy” feature
Met SLA, restored service in single-digit minutes, zero regressions; still a 1‑star CSAT - availability is five‑nines, gratitude is eventually consistent
Customer support's CAP theorem: pick any two from Competency, Availability, and Positive surveys
and then I block him Comment deleted