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So, the department heads did what you might expect. They reviewed the survey results well ahead of the meeting. They identified which teams were the recipients of the ones, twos, and threes. They tasked those teams (through their managers) to:

Contact the customer and determine the nature of the problem.

Explain the cause of the poor rating.

Explain what they were going to do to keep from getting that rating again (yes—at this point the manager wasn't using the metric properly).

What the workers heard was:

Contact the customer and see if you can appease them.

Figure out who was to blame.

If you couldn't appease them, and you were to blame, what are you going to do about it?

But let's get back to the impact on the team. All they heard from leadership was that the surveys were highly critical of them—the customers obviously hated them. Since leadership only shared the lower-rating surveys, the team assumed that they never received higher customer satisfaction ratings.

The funny thing is that all of the surveys were available to the team, but no one on the team had ever considered reviewing the surveys for himself.

What you say may not be what others hear.

The team believed they were the dregs of the organization due to the following mistakes in handling the customer satisfaction metric:

The CEO and department heads (innocently) requested explanations for each poor customer satisfaction rating.

The manager passed on this request to the team, without considering the affect it would have on them.

The manager never bothered to review the surveys for his team.

The team never bothered to use the survey reviews for anything other than appeasing the bosses.

Bottom line? The data was only being used by upper management to ensure service quality for the customers. And when the requests for more information came down stream (a good thing in itself), the surveys were taken “out of context” (the team believed they were hated by customers) and no one shared or looked at any of the positive comparison data.

This innocent behavior created stress, low morale, and a misperception of the level of satisfaction the customers had of the team.

After more than a year of this type of interaction, I was tasked with developing a scorecard for the key services in our organization. This team's service was one of our core services, so I visited them to develop their scorecard.

When I offered to include customer satisfaction on the scorecard, I met unexpected resistance. I was not aware of what they'd been going through on a bi-monthly basis.

I knew that customer satisfaction ratings were consistently a strength in the larger organization, and I was sure that this service would be no different. But the team was just as confident that the ratings would be horrendous. They also argued that since each of the customer satisfaction surveys were administered to customers who had had problems (hence the need for the second-level support they provided), the results would be skewed against them.

Again, I tried to assure them that this was not normal for the organization. And again, speaking from their observations and experience, they assured me it was going to be ugly.

One of my best moments working with metrics happened when I presented the full metrics on customer satisfaction to this team. It turned out that the ratio of highly satisfied customers compared to those who gave them lower ratings was far higher than the team realized. In fact, the team's customer satisfaction ratings were consistently ten-to-one in favor of good service!

While the team, their manager, and I were very happy about the outcome, it was enlightening to all of us how such a seemingly logical use of a metric could cause so much harm.

The damage to the team's morale was enough to confirm for me the need to be extremely careful with metrics.

Misuse of Metrics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Respect the power of metrics. This respect should include a healthy fear and awe. By having a small, healthy dose of fear and awe when dealing with metrics,