MarketTools Blog

This is a follow-up to a previous post offering three tips to effectively start a program to tie customer feedback to employee compensation.  

For some customer-centric organizations, now is the time to take broadly-shared customer feedback and use that data to motivate and compensate employees.  An effective employee compensation program is based on a mature and healthy voice of the customer program, gauged by the appropriate metrics, and structured with the right goals and rewards. 

But to keep your employee compensation program on the right track, you need to watch out for the following issues:

• Guard against manipulation.  
  The dark side of tying feedback to compensation is that you give employees a good reason to scrutinize the data (best case) or manipulate the numbers (worst case).  Trustworthy data is the foundation of a good feedback-based compensation program and you must work to protect it!
   
  Here’s one example I’ve run into several times: organizations that actively follow up with customers who give low scores sometimes feel those customers made a mistake and meant to give a 10 instead of a 0.  They innocently ask whether they can change the data to “correct” this.  My answer is nearly always a resounding NO!   Systematically changing negative answers to positive ones like this biases your results. (After all, you’re not calling those 10s and asking if they actually meant to give a 0, right?)  Suspected problems with survey comprehension should be solved in the survey.  Not in the dataset after the fact.
   
  You must also be on the lookout for manipulation of the respondent sample.  Is it possible to systematically mis-record customer email addresses or pass only certain interactions into an IVR survey to make sure only the best interactions are surveyed?  Might individuals within the organization remind their favorite customers to take the annual survey but “forget” about the customers they know are dissatisfied?  Do your reps or sales reps directly encourage customers to give good scores?  All of these can bias the final results and de-legitimize your program.
• Make your compensation goals visible, and get employee buy-in.  
  Your compensation program is a pointless exercise if members of your organization don’t take the program to heart and really strive to drive good scores.  To encourage buy-in, make sure everyone knows what the metric(s) and target goals are, how they are calculated, how exactly people in their position can move the needle, and what’s in it for them if they do.  They should also be able to see the most current scores as often as is practical.
   
  You might consider starting off the first year with a focus on upside only, and give an extra bonus for meeting certain customer feedback targets.  In a support or sales organization, think about spot bonuses monthly or quarterly for top performers to keep the metrics (and how each employee can impact them) front of mind.  Small token prizes can also be used this way on a more frequent basis (e.g. $10 Starbucks gift card for the support rep with the most perfect scores that week).
   
  As far as making the data visible, I have one client whose call center walls are practically wallpapered in customer feedback data and goalposts—that’s the right philosophy!  (As a side note: Save a tree and your sanity and use an enterprise feedback management tool like MarketTools CustomerSat Role-Based Reporting to make it really easy to share the right type of data by specific role, at any level of the organization.)

The key goal for tying customer feedback to compensation is to motivate employees to provide the highest level of customer service.  By linking feedback data that helps employees both to grow professionally and gain financial rewards, you’ll empower them to deliver the kind of customer experience that gives your company a true competitive advantage.