Should you reward your managers for providing a superb customer experience by managing their employees well and setting the tone for improved customer encounters?

In many cases, the answer to this question is, “Yes.” While you expect your managers to excel at leading their teams, you also want to reward them when they’ve done well.

How will you know when they’ve excelled at their job? When you’ve received positive survey scores.

In this article, we look at rewarding managers for good survey scores.

Customer Service is Key

In today’s digital world where reviews are everywhere on the internet, it’s never been more important to provide the best possible customer service. It’s what separates your business from the competition.

One way to encourage your staff to provide top notch service is to reward them, and this starts with your managers.

Since you recognize the importance of providing excellent service, you want to use your surveys to find out if your customers agree that is what is happening.

By surveying respondents to learn how they feel about your service, you are immediately putting your staff on notice. This may be a cultural shift for some of them, but one that’s immensely important to your overall success.

As your managers and ultimately your entire team see that customer service is your top concern, and they note that you are going to use surveys to gauge it, they’ll soon jump on-board.

So, by rewarding managers for good survey scores, you send a strong message that customer service matters, and that you’re willing to reward staff members for helping you excel.

Tips for Succeeding with Rewards

Before you decide to reward your managers for good survey scores, you want to have the following in place:

• Set up a training program for your managers as well as your staff so they know how to serve your customers best.
• Create some parameters for measuring customer service through your surveys. Decide what you’d like to benchmark and what you consider good enough for rewarding your managers. They must know what’s expected if they’re going to reach your goals.
• Make sure your surveys reflect what’s important to the customer and not necessarily to you. For example, what the customer wants out of the experience might not be what you think they want.
• Once you receive the surveys, go through them with your managers. You want to communicate the feedback you receive so everyone understands it and places the same value on it.
• Use your Net Promoter Score. Let it drive the change you want to see in your business. The NPS tells you the value your company has in the eyes of the consumer. This is a good way to measure the customer experience, so you can reward managers when it’s positive.
• If the surveys aren’t positive, do you have a structure in place to identify problems and effect change? Talk to your manager and implement the proper procedures.
• Make sure your managers have ownership of the survey results and create a plan with your team for managing the customer experience throughout the year.
• Outline the reward program so it’s official. Give them a target to reach for and encourage them to share the “thank-you” with their staff for a job well done.

Final Thoughts

It can be beneficial for your company to reward and incentivize your managers for good survey scores.

Not only will it help your company excel at customer service, it let’s your entire staff know that a culture of “customer first” is important to you.

On the flip side, you do want to set out in writing what you’re going to do when surveys don’t come back with good scores. It pays to make your staff aware of what happens when you receive good survey scores and when you receive not-so-good scores.

Ultimately, the goal of rewarding your managers is to encourage their strong participation in your customer service goals and to improve your bottom line.

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Image: Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash