Goal Alignment

October 5th, 2006

One of my colleagues explained to me his recent despair on dealings with a company (which I won’t name) I used to work for. He had purchased an electrical item from them several months ago and had experienced several faults with it. It is the company’s policy not to take back or repair such items instore, but rather for its customers to contact their 35p a minute technical support line. His grievance was the difficulty he had in getting them to dispatch an engineer for him to fix the fault. Working in IT, he has a fair idea of computers and had already identified the issue yet it took him four separate phone calls to arrange an engineer to come to his house.

The people who are answering his calls have a group of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which rate how well they are helping the company perform and if they reach certain targets they receive cash bonuses.

Here is the problem:

• He was phoning to try and get an engineer to come and repair his product as soon as possible.
• The person answering his call gets cash bonuses for how few engineers he dispatches

The company’s policy has aligned its staff goals and consumer goals against each other, you have a consumer trying to achieve and objective and you are giving your staff an incentive to deter them from satisfying the customer. While I worked at this company, they had a lot of numbers and graphs to try and justify why they did this but they still seemed confused when their customer satisfaction for after sales dropped month on month.

Conversely, this is why Affiliate Campaigns work so well, because the goals of the merchant, affiliate and affiliate network are all aligned. The affiliate wants to work together to create more sales so they earn more commission, the affilate networks want to help out so they keep their monthly fee and slice of commission and of course, the merchant wants to sell has much as possible.

It is always worth taking a step back and looking at the motivation behind your staff, consumers and dealers. What makes your salesmen try hard? Why do your consumers choose to shop with you? Why is this supplier dealing with you? Once you have that worked out, everything becomes a lot clearer.