A Real-Life Encounter with a Questionable Comp Plan Design

Incentive plans are intended to align employee’s behaviors with a company’s business strategy, and then drive those behaviors.  But sometimes well-intentioned plans can go awry.  I recently had an experience as a customer with an incentive plan that I’m sure was designed to drive good customer service, but ended up driving employees telling me how I needed to fill out a coming survey.  Although I really did receive good service throughout, the final experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

A few weeks ago I was coming home from a meeting in downtown Denver right after a Rockies game in very heavy traffic.  A driver next to me tried to go around the car turning right from her lane (which was waiting for pedestrians to cross the street) and hit my car.  Luckily no one was injured, but it did some pretty expensive damage to the passenger side of my car.  Her insurance company called and scheduled an appointment for me at a local auto body shop that they’re affiliated with.

Dropping my car off was quick and easy and the receptionist, insurance agent, auto body technician, and rental car agent were all friendly and efficient.  It only took two days to get my car back clean and fixed.  Up to this point, I was a very satisfied customer who would recommend both the body shop and the insurance company.  Then I was told twice about the survey that would be coming, and requested to make sure to only give a score of 10 on the survey.  I haven’t seen the survey yet, but am assuming it is a 10-point scale.

 

A score of 10 on a 10-point scale in my opinion means that there isn’t anything that could have been done better.  Maybe I’m just too picky, but I could think of a couple of things that could have been better and I think that perfection is difficult to attain.  I didn’t have any real complaints and would have filled out the survey with high scores.  But now as a customer who understands compensation plans, I’ve got a dilemma:  Do I give the scores of 10 and just use the comments area to list what could have been better since I think everyone did well and want them to get their full reward?  Or do I give the high scores I was originally going to give that didn’t quite reach perfection?

 

Now the company, who wanted to measure customer satisfaction, isn’t necessarily getting the real picture.  This is why it’s imperative to understand the real-world implications of plans that we put in place.  How will they actually play out in day-to-day operations?  What behaviors will our employees adopt to get the results we pay for (whether or not those are the results we actually want)?  It is our job as Compensation professionals to make sure that the plans we put in place work the way we need them to throughout the customer experience. 

 

Darcy Dees works as the Compensation Manager for Rock Bottom Restaurants, Inc., headquartered in Louisville, CO.  She has been working in Compensation for over 5 years now and recently attained her Certified Compensation Professional (CCP) designation.  She spends what little free time she has hiking and reading.

 

Image:  Creative Commons Photo "broken glass" by Nesster

Comments

[working girl]

This is awesome, Darcy. First of all, I totally agree that good service should be invisible. I appreciate the dilemma of companies trying to measure how good their service is but no one wants to fill out a survey. Except really weird people. And I enjoyed a good laugh about the poor people handing their customer sat survey to a comp specialist. You just couldn't give them a 9.5 and be done with it, could you? ;-) The most important message here is that a number is NEVER the whole story.

[Darcy Dees]

Working Girl - I'm glad you got a laugh out of this post! I'll probably
give them 10s since I think they did a good enough job that they
shouldn't be penalized due to a poorly conceived comp program. It just
makes me sigh when I see this type of thing.