Shenanigans!!!

Last week, Bruce Temkin discussed the ins and outs of tying employee compensation to customer feedback scores.

He offers a few observations on the issue, my favorite of which is:

• "If there is significant compensation tied to any metric (including customer feedback), then people will look for ways to manipulate the measurement."

We have seen this in action, and it’s sort of like the People of Walmart site, in that you sort of need to see to believe.

Not too long ago, we worked with a national restaurant chain that performed several in-store assessments per month.

For one section of the assessment, the evaluators were asked to identify the manager, and note whether or not the manager was seen visiting tables and talking to guests.

One night, at a particular location, one of our evaluators was approached by a young employee wearing a manager’s shirt.

After a short conversation about how the dining experience was going, our evaluator commented to the manager that she seemed awfully young to be managing a restaurant.

To which the employee replied:

• “I’m not actually a manager. Our secret shopping program gives us more points if managers visit the tables, so the real manager has me wear this shirt and visit all of the tables.”

So yes, tying compensation to customer feedback will definitely lead to some degree of shenanigans, and the challenge is to develop feedback programs that offer as little opportunity for manipulation as possible.  

It’s definitely a learning experience (as opposed to the People of Walmart).

Comments

[Heather Oppor]

While working at a market research firm as a project manager I received a phone survey from our company's cleaning service. Always wanting to provide feedback when asked, they began..."on a scale from 5 to 7 how would you rate your satisfaction with our service?" Not sure if the individual had misread the script or my ears needed a good cleaning, I repeated "5 to 7?" "Yes," they responded "we were receiving to many scores below 5 so make it easier for people to respond we changed the scale."

[The Magnetic Group]

Now that's feedback we can believe in! Our whole office is bursting with that one. Thanks for sharing!!!

[Ray Sola]

Upper Management has never understood this concept. They say the employees are doing X correctly, so lets only reward them for doing Y. Guess what happens, they stop doing X and only do Y. Store managers have meetings to tell the employees to focus on Y. The problem is the customers really liked X and could not care less about Y.

I see plenty of Mystery Shop reports and I know what they are looking for in the staff and what tasks the want to see done. No customer want to be asked if they want socks to match the shirt they just bought. They would like to get thru the transaction quickly and all the idiotic questions about joining the member club, and do you want socks and would you like to be out friend on Facebook for a coupon are just annoying.

And when the upper management gets so focused on these non-items for rewards, then that is what the staff does. Walk into a store and get scared half to death as the employee screams HELLO from 1000 yards away. Why? Probably because the Mystery Shop report says "Were you greeted within 30 seconds of entering the store?'

ciao,
Ray Sola
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Founder & President
Volition.com LLC