Oddly Specific Intern Question

I know people hate questions like this cause you can usually read the room instead of crowdsourcing opinions, but hoping to pull on personal experiences of full-time employees.

I'm a current intern and my firm sets up 30-minute calls with all the partners to get to know the interns. I hopped on a call today and one of the partners had told me he "heard great things about my work and that people enjoy having me around in the office," 

Usually I'd chalk that up to small talk and just being nice, the same way you treat everyone kindly by default, but as a full-time employee, would you give out compliments that could be tied to return offer metrics to be kind or only when you truly mean it? Firm usually has a pretty low return rate because they're buy-side and don't need many analysts so I've been thinking about this quite a bit.

Thank you to anyone taking the time to respond in advance