Another report of a car dealership’s bad behavior in a customer survey: this time, a Ford dealer banned a customer because the customer gave honest but negative feedback.
It’s as though the dealer doesn’t actually care about providing a good experience, just getting a good survey.
Sadly, stories like this aren’t even surprising anymore. The auto industry’s survey processes are so heavily abused that it’s almost more surprising if a dealer doesn’t try to manipulate the survey.
I’ve written in the past that in situations like this, the company should just stop doing surveys rather than trying to fix such a broken process. The survey clearly isn’t providing an honest measure of customer satisfaction, and all the cheating and manipulation is actively making the customer experience worse.
The Ford dealer who banned a customer for a bad survey is a great example of a company which has fallen into the “Metric-Centric Trap.” The Metric-Centric Trap catches companies which, in an effort to become more customer-focused, become so caught up in measuring the customer experience that they lose sight of the actual customer.
Companies caught in the Metric-Centric Trap tend to focus their energies on gathering and improving their metrics rather than trying to understand and improve the customer experience. The problem with being Metric-Centric is that people are extremely complicated, and there is no way to directly measure all aspects of the customer experience. So any set of metrics is, at best, an approximate measurement of what’s really going on.
Metric-Centric companies also tend to put heavy incentives on employees to improve their metrics. That can have the perverse incentive of encouraging employees to focus on the specific activities which are being measured, and ignore the things which aren’t measured. And if it happens to be easier to “fire” an upset customer than train employees to do a better job, you get the situation with the Ford dealership.
Breaking out of the Metric-Centric Trap is not easy, and requires a significant cultural change. But companies caught in this situation often waste considerable time and money spinning their wheels on customer experience, and may even be making things worse despite as a result of the effort.
