Telstra, Australia’s largest Telco, has been well known for it’s roll-out of Net Promoter® over the past few years. Telstra has announced (see The Age newspaper) that it will be starting to partly pay its resellers based on their Net Promoter Score.
Through the current CEO (David Thodey) the company has been making a concerted push to improve customer service level which have traditionally been not as high as might be wished.
Telstra will pay its retailers not only sales commissions, but also for their customer service performance.
While incentivizing franchisees to improve customer service can be a good idea, the program will need to be carefully constructed to preventing gaming of the system. Where payments are linked to customer feedback scores there is a risk that front line staff (and their managers at the resellers) can actively try to alter the scores that customers receive.
This is much more common than you might think. Examples include hotel chain staff begging for scores, bank staff explaining to customers that “anything below a 9 [out of 10] is considered a failure”, and car dealerships offering incentives to customers if they will score them a 10.
So, I wonder what the anti-gaming approach will be here?
