Employee Rewards Without CSAT Gains

One of the most important changes your company can make in its efforts to increase customer satisfaction is to offer some type of reward/compensation to employees if you manage to reach your satisfaction goals. Every employee within a company plays a role in satisfaction, but unless you give your employees a reason to care, you'll find that more often than not they don't put the effort/changes you need. That's why compensation is so important.

But most companies base compensation on an increase in satisfaction. It may be import to also offer a secondary compensation for satisfaction scores that are roughly the same. It may or may not need to be as high as your initial reward, but there are reasons to provide rewards even if you see no change in your data.

Some of these reasons include: Baseline Every industry is different, and every business is different. No matter what previous data you may have on hand, it's hard to know with certainty what the upper and lower bounds of quality customer satisfaction are. Some industries will never reach high satisfaction no matter how much effort they place.

Others will rarely drop very low unless there is a good reason. Without any way to know baselines with any certainty, expecting big changes may be too difficult. Your scores may be very good as is.

Random Noise You don't want to fault your employees for the effects of statistical noise. A score of 6.5 once and a score of 6.5 another time may be the result of statistical noise, rather than no change in data. It's possible there was an increase, but because of the randomness of the sample it wasn't picked up in your dataset.

Employee Morale You do want to reward your employees when you can. It could hurt employee morale if the results of the survey never showed an increase, despite all of their efforts. Indeed, any bonus has the potential to improve employee morale, so offering at least a lighter bonus if they maintain the numbers would be advantageous.

These are just three of the reasons that you may want to consider when offering some type of employee bonus if, after working hard, your company maintains the same customer satisfaction score rather than improves upon it. It's always a good idea to shoot for improvement, but improvement may not always be possible.