The first clue that the company wasn't interested in my true opinion was when the "service consultant" asked me to give him an excellent rating, otherwise he'd get yelled at for doing a bad job. Now the reality of the situation was, this service consultant was far from excellent. But instead of looking for feedback as a means of improvement, they've decided to look for feedback as a means of validation.

There's an old saying: What gets measured, gets managed. And if your bonus is based on a metric, customer satisfaction ratings in this case, then the organization has created an incentive to improve the numbers, not necessarily the customer experience.

Even worse, this particular organization has created a punishment response that puts the pressure of a better customer satisfaction survey response on their front line staff. As a result the staff doesn't care about providing better service, but they do care about getting that oh-so-important excellent rating.

The root cause of this issue is simple. It's a badly designed reward system that incentivizes the wrong behavior. And this phenomenon of "making it look better on paper" appears at all levels of the work world. The CEO who improves short-term performance by juggling numbers on the balance sheet is no different than the service consultant begging for a better survey rating. Or event the marketing manager who calculates ROI numbers for their campaigns by tweaking a spreadsheet.

So how do you design better reward systems? I'm not sure. It's definitely something I'd love to learn more about. If anyone has any book recommendations, please leave them in the comments.