“10s Are Good”: Why Employees Beg for High Customer Service Scores
If you’ve recently bought a car, stayed at a hotel or purchased just about anything online, someone has probably asked you to fill out a survey rating his or her work. The employee may have requested a high score directly, or said something like the parting comment of the highly competent repairman who recently fixed my dishwasher pump: “You’ll be receiving a survey about my work. 10s are good.”
In the world of customer service, this is called survey begging, and if someone is begging you for a score, he doesn’t work for a company that is run very well. Begging is usually a symptom not of a rogue employee but of an ill-conceived system. It is the bosses who create the systems that produce this behavior. They can make it easy for employees to do the right thing, or the opposite. A company culture that fails to address gaming has a leadership issue.
The first mistake is linking frontline employees’ compensation to survey scores. This doesn’t just lead to undignified behavior from employees. It also takes the emphasis off learning and improving from customer feedback. That’s the whole point of the Net Promoter System, which weighs a company’s promoters (those giving 9s or 10s) against its detractors (6 and under). It should enhance customers’ experience and dignify employees.
Recently the Financial Times published a piece titled “Customer feedback: the mirror crack’d,” which points out that many companies are not doing a very good job utilizing NPS.
This can be fixed.
Start by getting the team focused on the real objective: enriching customer lives in an economically sustainable way. Use the NPS survey to help accelerate learning. Monitor real behaviors like referrals, repeat purchases and repeat calls to service centers, data that we call “signal NPS.” This information can help substantiate, correct or explain customer scores.
We all know when an employee or a company is truly trying to enrich our lives. It’s obvious. My dishwasher technician arrived early, worked quickly and answered my questions expertly and pleasantly. The machine’s disturbing grinding noise has stopped, and my dishes look great. In short, he provided very good customer service.
His employer would be smart to do away with the incentives that left him begging for the 10 he had already earned.
Your article should give pause to these firms who create these situations where you've gone through a successful purchase experience only to have the sales associate or service rep mention that without a 10, they're in trouble. Many people through belief that no one is perfect or have the experience of never getting a 10 at work from their superiors but have heard repeatedly that "no one is a 10" simply will give 8.
Great article Fred! It is a very sad reality nowadays. Every call, every purchase or any type of transaction or service is followed by a survey to provide a rating. The questions posed do not provide the real picture of the customer's experience or the employee's performance or the issues the company needs to address to improve performance, efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee loyalty and performance etc. It can be frustrating for customers who usually skip the surveys due to extra time or extra emails filling their inbox. It is stressful for the employees, as well, who try to persuade the customer to take the survey since their bonus, raise or review depends on the survey quantity and quality results. There are more effective, objective, and sustainable methods to measure performance in our technologically advanced data centered era.
Survey begging has become very common due to NPS score linked compensation and incentives. It actually irritates the customer and in many cases turns a not-so-bad experience to a bad experience.
Analogous to the tyranny of the commons, there is the tyranny of the metrics. What gets measured gets managed. But, just because something is being measured doesn't mean it's being managed effectively. NPS results are only meaningful when managed in a meaningful manner.
fantastic