Bonus Compensation & Satisfaction

Recently we had an article about the importance of linking employees to customer satisfaction. If employees are not given a reason to be motivated, they will not show the commitment to improving satisfaction that you need in order to see a difference. Bonuses are easily one of the most effective ways to do this – by providing a bonus to employees based on customer satisfaction scores, employees know that their hard work will be rewarded if they display a customer-first strategy.

You should always try to make sure that these bonuses are providing you with the desired result. Here are several thoughts on how to improve the effects of these bonuses: Reward Former Employees For customer satisfaction to be at its highest, employees need to be at the top of their game 100% of the time.

But when an employee quits or plans to quiet (whether for personal or professional reasons), they lose out on that reward, and may not be as motivated to provide that same customer service. That's why you should consider providing bonuses that are commensurate with the time that the employee spent with the organization, even if the employee left the organization (provided they left by choice). This may motivate even employees that plan to leave the company, showing them that there is still reason to be customer service oriented.

Eventually Expect Maintenance We've talked at length about how unrealistic it is to expect a perfect score, so you may want to consider creating a structure that gives bonuses based on overall scores, rather than score improvements. This largely depends on the current satisfaction scores, among other things, but eventually it becomes difficult for even outstanding employees to create any improvement, and you need to be able to continue to reward employees for their hard work even if the scores are maintained, not improved. Be Fair Make sure that your rewards structure is fair to your employees.

For example, it may not be fair to punish employees that work in one sector for overall scores that failed only in another sector. It may also not be fair to punish employees if management, not the employees, created some failure that resulted in lower satisfaction (such as a rapid price increase). Employee satisfaction is as important as customer satisfaction, so make sure you are rewarding the employees that deserve to be rewarded even if something is off with the final scores.