Customer Satisfaction Surveys Gone Wild!

While paying for some service work at a local auto dealer, the service manager handed me a Customer Satisfaction Survey that they were required to use as part of a corporate-wide service improvement initiative. The survey had the usual five-point Likert scales for expressing my views, with questions like "Were our people helpful?" or "Was your car ready when expected?" and possible responses along the lines of 1-Totally Wow, 2-OK, 3-Average, 4-Bad, 5-Total Crap.

The interesting twist was that the manager asked me to only rank things as 1 or 2, to represent Happy or Not Happy. If I wanted futher response from the dealership, use a 2 to indicate Not Happy, and they would follow up with me on the issues.

I asked why, and he said that a copy of each response stays at the dealership, and a copy goes to head office. If survey answers go to head office with a 3, 4 or 5, they would send "the Spanish inquisition" to the dealership, rake everyone over the coals, and make a whole lot of noise about doing your best and the importance of the customer. The whole idea from head office was that every dealer should be thrilling their customers, not just providing average or poor service. As an aside, all of my experiences with this dealership had involved an excellent service relationship, in terms of attitude, technical skill, price and schedule.

He further said that whenever the inquisitors swooped in, it just made all his people very unhappy and didn't help resolve any problems anyway. Internally, the dealership treated any 2-OK's as if they were 5-Total Crap's and followed up to try to make the customer happy, but they preferred to do this without the heavy hand of head office. With a little more discussion, he shared that most of the other dealers had been doing the same thing - trying to give good service while distoring the surveys to avoid the tyranny of head office.

So, in the grand survey collection and reporting apparatus of this company, this dealership (and probably most of the others) would show great improvements in service, showing mostly 1's and 2's. Management would be satisfied that their improvement initative was working, where all that had changed was that the dealerships were distorting the numbers to avoid abuse.

If you set an arbitrary target and hold people accountable for meeting that target, they will (validly) find a way to survive, and avoid the wrath of management. If there is no real way they can change the process, they will distort the numbers. Rather than setting arbitrary targets and holding people accountable for things they can't control, go down to the work and see what you can do to help them improve the process; work with them to make the work better and the results will take care of themselves.