The first time it happened, I didn’t give it much thought. Probably just an overzealous store clerk trying to stand out from the rest of the pack, I figured. But after the fifth or sixth time that a cashier concluded a sales transaction by urging me to complete a satisfaction survey (the details of which could be found on my receipt) and asking me to give them high marks and/or mention them by name, I started to wonder what was going on.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been the recipient of this unsolicited coaching at a fast-food restaurant, a drug store chain and at national home improvement and pet-food retailers. It got me to wondering: Did I miss something? Had there been some fundamental shift in the rules governing how employees can deliver satisfaction surveys to customers?

Granted, the problem of salespeople coaching customers to give them high marks is not new. It’s been well-documented in the automotive realm, where in some cases it can go beyond coaching and veer toward something darker, as in the case of a friend of mine who was almost physically prevented from leaving a dealership by a salesman, who pleaded with him to be given top marks across the board on the post-sales satisfaction survey.

Become more common

Experiences such as mine are not widespread but they have become more common outside of auto sales, says Dave Fish, division vice president of automotive research, Maritz Research, Torrance, Calif. “You are seeing more and more of it at the retail level. Whenever you put a metric to something, people are going to try to influence it. Sometimes they do so in the easiest way they can, which is, rather than changing their behavior, they try to influence the score. It is sometimes easier to convince a customer to change their rating than actually to improve the service that you are providing,” he says.

In auto sales, one root cause of overzealous coaching is that there is a lot more at stake than just research. “Jobs are sometimes on the line,” Fish says. “And if you walk into an auto dealership, it can range from anything from, ‘You’re going to get a survey in the mail and we’d appreciate it if you would turn it in’ - and that’s not bad, in my mind - to every shade of gray all the way down to, ‘If you don’t give me all top-box, my boss is going to fire me.’”

Obviously, at the retail level, things are not as make-or-break, as transactions are smaller in dollar amount and cashiers are being judged on a larger total number of transactions. Still, that doesn’t seem to be stopping them from wanting to influence the process, at least in the instances I encountered. 

But who’s initiating the problem? Is it the individual employees or their store managers? Or someone higher up? “It could be all of the above,” says Andy Fromm, president and CEO of Service Management Group, a Kansas City, Mo., research firm. “It could be an individual who just wants to be recognized. It could be a store manager who wants their bonus improved. It could be a district manager or a regional manager - any one of those folks who lacks the integrity to try and improve the customer experience and is just focused on the short-term.”

The behavior of a rogue clerk can, in theory, be corrected by monitoring and retraining. But what do you do about instances such as my experience at the drug store chain, in which my receipt was stapled to a photocopied sheet of paper - about 4x6, with a grainy corporate logo at the top - bearing the following:

How did we do today? My name is _________________. It is our goal to provide all customers with friendly, helpful service. If you received great service today, please call the number on your receipt and give us a score of a 9! If there is anything that we could have done better, please let us know that too.

If you do call and complete the survey, your name will be entered into a monthly drawing to win $3,000!!!

Thank you for choosing Drug Store Chain X

“If it’s an associate doing it and it’s not tied to money, it’s less egregious,” Fromm says. “It’s more about retraining them and telling them the right way to do it. When you get into management and there are bonuses associated with it, it’s more of a concern.”

“Our recommendation,” Fish says, “is that you have a very clear policy with your franchisees or branches, or whatever the outlet is that we are talking about, and you make it explicit about what employees can and can’t do - what is and what is not cheating. It’s OK to remind people about the survey. It’s not OK to offer a free oil change for all top-box scores.”

Part of the problem

In many instances, the customer satisfaction measurement system is part of the problem. “I think the root cause is that companies are using the metrics much more to make clerks accountable and using them as performance metrics, where we as researchers like to believe they are using the information to make process improvements and diagnose what is going on with the system. When a clerk’s job is at stake with these kinds of surveys then they get very attuned to having customers give them a good score,” Fish says.

To avoid placing too much emphasis on the scores generated by satisfaction surveys, Fish says that for some clients, Maritz recommends a combined performance metric that has behavioral aspects to it along with customer satisfaction measurement. And also, management shouldn’t make it an all-or-nothing situation, where the worker has to get, say, all top scores in order to be viewed as performing well. “What really fuels it is the amount of pressure that you put on one score. The more pressure you put on one score, the more likely people are going to try to influence it,” Fish says.

Active management

As with so many business undertakings, it all comes down to training and active management, Fromm says. “When you have people who are new to measurement, if it has been poorly explained, if there is too much focus on the numbers instead of the real experience, you can get people who go out of bounds. But great leadership straightens that out pretty quickly. When you do that, you get organizations that don’t go out of bounds because they are focused on the measurement.”

Beyond derailing the customer satisfaction process, this type of respondent coaching simply hurts the retailers in the long run, as it undercuts the systems that are designed to help them identify problems and deliver excellent service, Fish says. “If you are monkeying with your metrics, and spending millions of dollars to measure customer satisfaction, and you are trying to influence people to respond to a survey in a way that’s different than the way they truly feel, you are wasting a lot of money. You are collecting customer feedback but you are interfering with what the truth is. So you are preventing yourself from being able to fix institutional or systemic process problems because you screwed up your dashboard.”

Both Fish and Fromm said their respective firms monitor the satisfaction results of their clients for problems such as this and take appropriate action. “When we look at rooting it out, we look for anomalies in the data to indicate something is going on,” Fromm says. “So when we see a bump in scores, we look. When we see extreme variations in scores or if a certain region or certain stores are performing especially well, we look. We have a dozen different areas that we flag, such as mentioning people by name. Sometimes that’s good. But when you have an exception, it’s worth asking the questions to find out what’s going on.”

More companies care

Both also said they don’t feel the problem is getting worse, my own experiences notwithstanding. In fact, they said it tends to be more of a regional concern than a national one, when the problem flares up. “The good news is that more companies in this economy care about measurement because they are understanding the importance of retaining clients and customers and they are looking to measure performance, and that’s critical. So there is clearly a bigger focus on measurement,” Fromm says.