You may know that offering incentives drives behavior and outcomes. So, it may seem like rewarding your staff for good survey scores should follow right along.
Yet, there are two schools of thought on this type of incentive. In this article, we look at the pros and cons of rewarding management for good scores.
First, let’s look at the cons of rewarding good survey scores.
Con: Extreme Score Focus
Basically, you’re getting staff who may be more focused on getting the right survey score that they miss all the important parts of customer service.
Once you’ve tied compensation or rewards to the score, your team may focus less on improving your products or customer experience and spend more time convincing people to give them a good score. (tweet this)
In addition, if your team gets bad scores, you may find they criticize everything from your data-collection method to the time of year, the types of products you carry, or even staff support.
Con: Gaming the System
This can be a dangerous outcome of rewarding management as your team tries to game the system to earn better feedback.
For example, they might bury customers they know will give negative feedback. You might find them only pursuing feedback from customers they know are happy.
This completely skews your data.
You also might find employees who tell customers they’ll get a reward if the survey is positive. This puts guilt onto your customer and can hurt the overall experience.
Bottom line – you don’t want your management team begging for reviews or guilting anyone into providing good ones.
Con: Intimidation
In the extreme, you might find management intimidating your staff as well as your customers when you’re getting ready to send a survey.
They may threaten or intimidate people into inflating your results.
Again, this renders your survey useless and leaves you with both disgruntled staff and unhappy customers.
Con: It Takes Attention Away
Another con with rewarding your team for the customer service you expect is that it takes their attention away from providing great service because they are focused on winning the reward or prize.
Your team may even resort to submitting phony surveys to inflate their results.
Pro: The Reward is the Service
On the flip side, many times rewarding your employees for providing the best customer service actually encourages them to provide it.
This is why many companies reward management for positive customer satisfaction surveys.
In fact, many companies in the United States are using a large percentage of their payroll to reward their teams and retain their best talent.
How to Overcome the Cons
While the cons of rewarding management are many, it can still be very positive for your company.
Take a look at the following tips to make sure you do it correctly and don’t end up with any of the negative behavior.
- To combat gaming the system and begging for survey results, you can reward your employees for specific behavior and not for higher ratings. For example, you might reward management for attending training, managing negative conflict, and rewarding customer problems quickly and efficiently. When they do these things, naturally the scores increase.
- Instead of putting your team on the spot and feeling like their reward is at risk, set attainable goals for them. Create a set of goals that all lead to enhanced customer service. Again, the good survey results will follow. By doing this, you encourage your team to take risks by providing the best service possible.
To Conclude
Rewarding management for good scores can be a positive thing for your business, but only if it is done correctly.
You have to be careful to reward the right way so you can avoid negative behavior.
Reward your team for the things they’re doing right that lead to a better NPS (Net Promoter Score). This way they aren’t rigging the score. They are actively working on being better every day.
The key is to motivate your team to engage in activities that lead to good scores instead of focusing on the score itself.
Help them to focus on learning how to provide the best customer service, and you’ll find the cons disappear, while your survey scores increase.
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