Survey Compensation for Employees Gone Awry

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I'm adamantly against financial compensation for staff based on customer-service survey results. Invariably, it leads to customer-service agents gaming the system; this happens far more than executives are willing to acknowledge. For instance, a K-mart cashier posted a sign at the register saying, "For a chance to win a $2,500 gift card, log onto KmartFeedback.com and rate our customer service 9 or 10. Thanks for shopping at your 1 Penn Plaza Kmart!" Of course, people have a chance to win no matter what rating they give.

(photo: bcurrie)

A post on this example at The Consumerist led to a rash of comments giving examples for other major brands:

• CVS - "Yesterday I went to CVS for a prescription. When I checked out, the cashier looked at my receipt and stated that I had been selected to participate in a survey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know - this happens all the time, but she then showed me a mini candy bar and said, ‘you get a free Take5 candy bar so that will remind you to give us all 5's on the survey!' I thought it was pretty smart but I still didn't do the survey..."
• Enterprise - "I was asked to rate an Enterprise rental by the customer rep, on a scale of 1-10 (or whatever it was). I said 9 because I figure one should save 10 for over-the-top service; this particular rental went smoothly, but was nothing special. He kept after me, wanting to know what was wrong, why I didn't give them a 10, until I got the point that to them ‘10' means ‘normal service'."
• Home Depot - "The Home Depots around me [hand you a flyer] telling you the almost exact same thing."
• Nissan - "This reminds me of whenever I buy a car. The Nissan salesperson reminds me that I will receive a survey in the mail, and that I'm supposed to return that survey with all 5's (the best possible mark), or else their dealership will be dinged or knocked down some points or whatever. I don't generally return surveys anyway, and I certainly don't when someone tells me what my answers should be anyway."
• Old Navy - "An Old Navy store stapled a piece of paper to my receipt with a similar suggestion - something like ‘rate us a 10 and get 10% off'. Of course you get 10% off for filling out the survey no matter what, so I filled out the survey honestly, with perhaps a slight negative influence from the suggestion."
• Sears - "Did the same thing when I worked at Sears but it said all 10s and we were told to tell them all 10s or we'd fail. It would be nice if they used the surveys to better themselves."
• Target - "I have had plenty of cashiers at Target say that sort of thing too."
• Toyota - "A Toyota dealer actually told me to bring in the survey so we could 'fill it out together'. In exchange - he would fill my gas tank."

• Don't financially incentivize any staff based on survey results. Doing so will change the results, no matter how strong your corporate culture is (for instance, Enterprise would discipline the representative mentioned above). Compensating only managers will lead to managers asking representatives to ask for higher scores. The most important thing is to gather authentic feedback about current satisfaction.
• Don't use survey results as a crutch for measuring employees. It's vital that you share rich, relevant feedback with agents so that they can serve customers better in the future. Their managers need to mentor them not overmeasure them. (See Employee-Customer Engagement Best Practices.)
• Don't use the Net Promoter Score as a transactional measure. From these and other anecdotes, it is clear that the NPS in customer-service settings leads to a collapse in the range and validity of the scale and an obsession with the top score, even for organizations like Enterprise that try to counterbalance this.
• Don't use numbers. They are arbitrary; in some pure mathematical realm they are better for averaging than the results of fully labeled scales but the lower interrater reliability of numeric scales negates that. What an 8 means on a 10-point scale varies from respondent to respondent. Use labels, as in these common rating scales, and make the highest labeled point hard to achieve: Not at all satisfied, Slightly satisfied, Moderately satisfied, Very satisfied, Completely satisfied.

Do you have any examples of being asked to provide artificially high ratings to surveys?

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