Guess What? If Your Workers Are Rewarded for Helping the Customer, They'll Help the Customer

By Naeem Zafar and Mei Lin Fung, Institute for Service Organization Excellence, Inc.

You may know that the wheels on your car require alignment every 25,000 miles (or more often, depending on how bumpy the roads you drive are). Your wheels are not the only things that need regular alignments. Your business does, too. The bumps in the road can get things there out of alignment, especially if you business is spread wide or has many employees.

CEOs often make rosy statements like, "We have the best employees and we provide the best-in-class training for our employees and we pride ourselves in customer service." But often the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to judge management bonuses are optimized for other factors. And employee compensation is tied to yet another set of parameters.

And then, guess what? There is no chance that the CEO's proclamations can be realized in an organization with hundreds of employees, unless there is alignment among these three factors. As compensation schemes and KPI-based bonuses get revised annually, or sometimes more often, or the CEO comes up with a new slogan, the misalignment gets worse. And typically, no one is paying attention to the alignment. So just one serious bump and the business drifts to the left and risks going off the road.

Consider contact centers. They are a focal point for customer experience, as a significant number of customers contact a business through its contact center. Yet few metrics for contact centers are tied to compensation or a good customer experience. Instead, metrics are chosen simply because they are easy to measure. A conflict can arise between satisfying a customer and satisfying a metric. Take, for example, the 80/20 Rule in call centers: answering 80 percent of the calls in 20 seconds. When an organization strictly applies the metric, without also assuring that the call center is adequately staffed, customers may be left with a feeling of being rushed or not being serviced to their satisfaction. In trying to hit the 80/20 metric, the call center may give "assuring a quick human response" priority over "assuring a satisfactory customer experience."

Here's a typical declaration of customer service:

We deliver extraordinary customer experiences that earn our customers trust with every encounter. Our employees, partners and management are dedicated to constantly innovating to delight and surprise our customers in many ways, every day.

Customers are told this in press releases, advertising and on company web sites. See the blue box to read how it too often plays out from the point of view of a contact center agent in terms of inconsistent training and follow-through. Talk about "Lost in Translation"! The misalignment needs to be fixed by regular checkups.

The customer is the last person in the circle and what the customer hears comes from the contact center agent on the phone or by email. When something doesn't work, the first reaction a customer has to that negative experience is: "I should let this business know, so someone can fix it and the company can keep me as a customer." If you have ever tried this, you know that it can be extremely difficult to get to speak to someone who really is able to help you by fixing the problem.

But it doesn't have to be that way if you have aligned your business to create a culture where employees don't have to be pushed or harassed or monitored to create the desired customer experience and if you have established who is responsible for creating that customer experience. In an aligned world, such behavior is a natural thing; it is what creates the most financial and social satisfaction for the employee—and his or her manager. That's because the KPI that the customer service rep is paid on is exactly the same measure as what the rep is helping create and deliver), and this lines up with the mission from the top. This also builds morale, so there is effortless joy in the company culture.

This is exactly what makes one company more fun to work at than many where, within moments of walking down the hallways, you can sense that things are not lined up.

You will feel the joy. It's exactly the same feeling you get when you are in your car on a wide-open highway and—even when you take your hands off the steering wheel to feel the air—the car does not drift but continues to glide effortlessly along the straight road. Now that's good alignment!