Linking customer feedback to bonuses
Having established a corporate measure of customer experience there is frequently a discussion around whether to link a target score for that measure to financial bonuses for either teams or individuals. This tends to raise a few points that need consideration:
1. To what extent can the individual influence the achievement of that target score?
2. Is the measure accurate enough to accommodate any natural statistical variation? E.g. is the change in score statistically significant? This is often a problem in B2B where there are a relatively small number of high value customers
3. Should the data be weighted in any way to reflect the views of the “most important” customers
4. Can the scores be impacted by cherry picking of customers? If individuals are being financially rewarded could they be incentivised to perhaps choose which particular customers are surveyed?
5. Can customers be influenced by employee guidance? Personally I have had a company set an expectation that if I am satisfied that should be reflected by a certain score on their scale when I am later contacted by a research agency
6. If employees collect the feedback how accurate will it be? Again I have recently been asked my likelihood to recommend, and then prompted by the employee to give a 9 or a 10.
Further areas for consideration before introducing a reward scheme linked to customer feedback are available on our website.