One trend that is starting to emerge in the customer experience space is tying incentivised pay to customer experience. The reasons for doing this seem obvious – if your employees are actively rewarded for delivering great customer experiences then it’s in their interest to make it happen.
But, to be in a position to do this, you need to know that the metrics and benchmarks you set are right and fair. After all, you need to be confident in the data that you have, if you’re going to be connecting something as important as employee incentive pay to your customer experience metrics. Otherwise you run the risk of dissatisfied employees, who don’t believe that the system is fair on them.
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Here are three questions to ask yourself about your customer feedback before linking it to incentivised pay:
#1 Is your customer experience data robust?
Your employees need to be confident that they way their incentive pay is calculated is fair and transparent. While there will be natural variations in the data, wild swings could suggest that there are underlying problems that are beyond the control of the frontline.
As well, if the data set is too small, it might not be enough to reduce statistical variation. This is important if you want to be confident that any score variations are as a result of genuine difference, rather than random peaks and troughs in scoring. You don’t want the extremes to inadvertently dominate the data.
#2 Is your feedback mechanism reliable?
Or, another way to ask this is, are you confident in the method that you’re using to collect feedback? If it’s prone to outages, then this will almost certainly affect your feedback scores. This isn’t fair on your customers and it isn’t fair on your employees. You’ll need to get this sorted before you can confidently introduce any incentivised pay programme.
#3 Are your response rates high enough to be representative of your customers?
If your surveys are getting the typical low response rates, then the insight you can get from them is going to be limited to what this group think and feel about their experience. If you’re able to increase your response rates, then the insight you’ll gather will be much more representative of your whole customer base. This will inevitably make your incentivised scheme more representative and fairer on your employees as well.
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