Every employee in the organization should have a customer experience metric on their performance scorecard, specific to their area of responsibility. This approach ensures that employees understand that improving the customer experience is “everyone’s responsibility.”
Furthermore, setting an overall corporate goal, such as a customer loyalty score or index, reinforces the message that employees must all work together to ensure an improvement in the end-to-end customer experience.
Setting targets is one of the trickiest parts of the process associated with linking customer experience metrics to compensation; it is a balance between art and science.
For those employees who are average performers, it is better to lean toward the upside and focus on the positive aspects of customer experience improvements rather than to risk demotivating employees with targets that they don’t believe they can achieve
To set credible, actionable and achievable targets, consider the following:
► The target must be set outside the margin of error to prevent rewarding employees for a simple random sampling error in the survey results.
► Consider the “end goal” or benchmark performance that you want the organization to ultimately achieve across all customer experience interactions.
► Determine what percentage improvement is expected to close the gap (e.g., 15%) between current performance and benchmark standards.
► Use a 1 decimal convention for reporting and target setting to prevent employees from focusing on minute changes in the actual numbers.
► Ideally, use one full year’s worth of data to establish the baseline before setting the target.
► Establish a standard (e.g., 8.5 out of 10) when improvements are not required, but rather target performance is set simply to maintain current performance.
