Customer satisfaction survey results are often a key component of a multi-unit organization’s corporate bonus structure. Such programs ensure that customer satisfaction remains top of mind for managers at all levels within a company. While the decision to link survey results and employee rewards must ultimately be made by each individual organization, it is certainly worth investigating. If your company decides that such a bonus program is right for you, it is important to give serious consideration to the approach you will take and to be mindful of the possible risks and complications.
What Works
Quarterly bonus payments work well for many organizations. They offer a nice compromise in that they occur often enough to maintain interest but are spaced far enough apart to give managers an opportunity to impact their scores. Compensation plans with a tiered pay out are often very effective. With a tiered pay out, most participants can achieve the lowest level of compensation, while the very highest level of compensation is reserved for only the best performers. These payments work well when they are based on two criteria:
1. Progress towards a corporate goal- Managers at or above their goal should be motivated to stay at that level. It’s easy for customer satisfaction to slip without continuous effort.
2. Demonstrated improvement over last quarter- This is also a good time to identify strong performers and set them up as mentors for those who missed the mark.
Inherent Risks
While data integrity is always of great importance in any research effort, the connection of compensation to customer satisfaction survey results on this sort of program heightens the potential for fraudulent activity. However, there are ways to establish customer feedback systems that reduce the risk of this occurring.
Take, for instance, the data integrity associated with using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as a means of collecting customer feedback. This is a commonly used method for collecting feedback among organizations with multiple locations. Customers call a toll-free number and use their telephone keypad to input answers to questions about their experience with a product or service. Unfair survey practices using IVR data collection are noticeable in some fairly common ways:
• The survey line is called frequently within a short time period, with the calls coming from the same originating phone number.
•The survey line for a particular store receives a high number of calls on certain days of the week or month.
•The survey line has an unusual number of calls from payphones.
•Many of the calls for one store are much shorter than the average length of most calls.
• An unusual amount of respondents give each attribute the highest rating, but avoid leaving comments for fear of being recognized.
Protecting the Data
Recognizing the damage that can result from efforts to “game the system”, a quality survey research program should have a number of built-in protection features. On the front-end of the data collection process, some of these include: single use pass codes, monitoring blocked and duplicate phone numbers for IVR systems and tracking Global Unique Identifiers (GUID) for web surveys.
On the back-end, proper data cleaning and automated integrity reporting is critical. Often times, a sophisticated integrity report can point out potentially fraudulent behavior. It is important to keep in mind that there may be valid reasons for a location’s results to fall outside the norm in a given period, and foul play is not necessarily presumed. However, it is vitally important to monitor these factors to manage the overall integrity of any survey program. This becomes even more critical when bonuses are involved.
The Bonus Program
In addition to ensuring that your data is accurate and valid, it is important to decide how you want to apply the results to a bonus program. Every organization has a different idea of what level of performance warrants a reward. Your company must define the variables that you plan to use. With the help of employees and customers, you can create a definition of customer satisfaction. Then determine which personnel behaviors affect customer satisfaction within your company and ensure that your survey asks the right questions to assess performance in these areas.
Implementing the Program
It might be a good idea to launch a new bonus program within a pilot location. After learning from the experience of this location, you can implement the reward program in other locations. Just as it is important to monitor the integrity of the survey results, it is also important to monitor the effect of your rewards program. Make sure that your program incents the correct behaviors so that, over time, survey results reflect its positive impact.
Joseph Stanton | VP Business and Product Development
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