Opinion

Gaming the system can paralyse customer experience

From Uber to Australian customer call centres, it seems everyone's desperate to get customer feedback. But when gaming the system comes into play, that five star rating doesn't seem so innocent anymore, writes Darren Bowman.

The business world has its fair share of instances where employees, particularly those working directly with customers, try to game or even cheat an incentive system in order for financial or other reward.

In one example, a Silicon Valley software company started offering small cash incentives to its employees for finding and fixing bugs in its code.

Unfortunately, the employees responded to this incentive by deliberately writing more bugs, which were then conveniently monetised through the process of “finding” and “fixing”.

Pay for performance has become a popular component of corporate compensation plans. In many cases, frontline employees’ pay depends in part on performance based metrics like store sales or customer satisfaction ratings.

As customer experience management has become more operational and customer feedback has become more pervasive, customer satisfaction scores are having a bigger impact on frontline pay.

But as many companies are now discovering, tying frontline compensation to customer feedback scores can produce unintended outcomes that sometimes get in the way of delivering a great customer experience.

Uber’s five star driver ratings system has always been a good way to provide feedback on the experience you’ve had with a driver and I’ve been personally impressed with follow up from Uber after a poor riding experience a year or so ago.

But something seems to have changed over recent months, where Uber appears to place even greater emphasis on a driver’s star rating. This in turn has changed the behaviour of their drivers.

In an Uber I got from the airport recently a driver had typed up a note and stuck it to his dashboard that said ‘If you are not going to rate me 5 stars please tell me now so we can talk about it’.

I had mixed feelings about the note, was the driver genuinely trying to improve the service he offered, or had other factors driven him to focus more on scores that the behaviours that delivers a positive experience for his riders?

I later found out that this driver’s behaviour may have been an unintended consequence of some form of incentivisation or requirement for drivers to hit a particular number. This change in focus has driven a focus towards the metric, rather than the behaviours that underlie an effective CX program. It is an increasing problem with many Australian businesses.

Gaming can appear in many forms and across many channels, but it’s almost always connected to incentivisation and personal gain. You may have experienced this when calling a contact centre that collects feedback after the call has ended as to how the agent has performed.

I’ve had countless experiences where at the end of call the line suddenly goes quiet and the experience survey has not being presented. Is this in itself gaming where the agent has it in their control to send calls through to that system, but where they think the experience hasn’t been an optimal one?

While my feedback may not always help them achieve the scores that will get them rewarded, it will most definitely provide the help and guidance as to how I would have liked to be treated differently. A lost opportunity to improve and a seemingly counterintuitive focus for a CX program.

Tying compensation to customer ratings signals that ratings, in and of themselves, are important. But what companies should really care about is the experience customers have, the behaviours that deliver positive ones and the perception of the brand they walk away with.

The intent of developing these types of incentivisation programs is one made in good faith and no business in my experience sets out to develop an assessment framework that promotes gaming. But the reality is, where incentives are connected to scores, there is a much greater temptation to do the wrong thing and game the system.

In turn, this can paralyse improvement and distort the intent of a well-designed CX program which is to deliver incremental improvements to the overall customer experience. It’s not about just going through the motions and hoping you deliver a score that gets each individual rewarded, it a learning cycle that rewards, embraces and celebrates the right behaviours and customer outcomes.

If your business wants to tie a financial reward or incentive into a CX program, and I’m not advocating that you shouldn’t, link it to the behaviour you want to drive across the business, as opposed to a number that is going to help you understand if you are actually delivering against it.

Darren Bowman is senior solutions consultant at Medallia.

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