Feedback Management Program: how to set up incentives?

The launch of a Feedback Management program has a major impact on an organization. Customer satisfaction is monitored on the spot, and with it part of the performance of operational staff. In fact, we frequently observe an increase in satisfaction levels in the weeks and months following the deployment of this type of program.

After the first few months, new priorities arise. If the Feedback Management program is not steered at management level, and there is a lack of leadership, customer satisfaction can become just another indicator. And for busy operational staff, it becomes less of a priority.

One of the levers for sustaining the process of continuous improvement in customer satisfaction is to include the results of customer satisfaction indicators in the calculation of the variable.

Start with a blank year...

This is a major change. It must be prepared for, and must involve all stakeholders.

To be effective, a goal must be neither unattainable nor too easy to achieve... while remaining ambitious.

It is therefore necessary to have sufficient hindsight on results, generally based on a one-year history, before setting targets. In most economic sectors, customer satisfaction is subject to seasonality. So it's best to wait a full year before setting targets.

To support this change, we recommend a "blank" year. During this year, objectives are posted, and at the end of the period, operational staff will know whether they have achieved their objective or not. But this will have no impact on the teams' variable pay or bonuses.

Subsequently, the objectives can be reworked for the following year and taken into account in variable calculations, if the program is sufficiently advanced. In some organizations, it takes several years before customer satisfaction is considered a KPI with an impact on team remuneration.

Group or site-specific objectives?

It can be interesting to set objectives at network level. For example: "A minimum NPS of 30% for all our stores". While this target is easy to set and monitor, it can be trickier to get operational staff to accept it, as they will want to adapt it to suit their own constraints, the history of the store in question, and so on.

Team recruitment, sales targets, infrastructure quality, customer segments addressed... are all factors that have an impact on customer satisfaction. Yet these components are not always within the manager's control. It is therefore difficult to objectively assess a level of satisfaction that is not in line with his or her reality on the ground.

Some of our customers have decided to set a target based on the actual service provided by operational staff, such as reception satisfaction. On this kind of indicator, a consistent objective across a network can be more easily accepted.

An annual review and a long-term objective

Annual targets are generally revised at the end of the period, based on the previous year's results. The revision is often negotiated with each manager (in the case of a network) according to his or her reality on the ground and the resources allocated to him or her to achieve objectives.

The important thing, as an organization, is to aim for a long-term goal. Each annual review can then be seen as a series of steps towards that goal. The incentive mechanism will need to be adapted to each of these steps.