Cigna recently announced that it will start tying executive compensation to customer satisfaction. It’s a smart way to ensure that employee incentives drive real business results and improve customer experience. This demonstrates to customers that their experience truly matters—and that delivering great service isn’t just an empty promise.
This is a strategy that every business should consider: making customer experience a measurable priority at every level of the organization.
The behaviors you recognize—whether through financial incentives or performance evaluations—shape how employees show up for customers. Therefore, If CX is a core value, you must build into the way success is defined across your organization.
In this article, I’m sharing three crucial tips you need to know for setting up employee performance-based metrics and incentives.
1. Get Clear on the Right Metrics and Incentives
Most businesses track performance, but not all metrics are created equal. In fact, there are two egregious mistakes that I often see companies make when it comes to employee incentives:
1. Rewarding the wrong behaviors: Many call centers incentivize agents based on the number of calls they complete per day instead of issue resolution. As a result, these companies experience more rushed conversations, repeat calls, and frustrated customers.
Similarly, some organizations reward sales team based on their customer acquisition numbers instead of customer renewals, yet they’re upset when their biggest clients walk away. If you want to prioritize retention, align your sales team’s KPIs accordingly.
2. Being too vague with expectations: Vague goals cause vague outcomes. Focus on empowering your employees and putting them in control of the outcomes whenever possible. In his book CX 2.0: Create WOW Customer Experiences, Scott Harris, CEO and founder of Experience.com, sums up this point perfectly. He writes:
“When you ask your employees to improve NPS scores, they won’t be engaged in that outcome. They will likely tell you that they are doing a great job and the NPS scores are not about them. Instead, create a method for collecting qualitative data at the employee level and update the way you pay employees to include a factor based on their individual scores. Now they will definitely be engaged.”
To avoid falling into these traps, you should follow the framework from my good friend, Dennis Snow. I interviewed the former Walt Disney World Executive on season one of my podcast, and I loved the simple process he shared for aligning your organization around CX:
Use This Process to Set Employee Incentives
- Ask: “What are 3 things you want your customers to say about their experience with you?” (Example: at Disney, they want customers to recognize that they pay attention to every detail).
- Identify the employee behaviors that must happen to make those statements true (Disney employees are trained to pick up every piece of trash they see).
By using this approach, you can pinpoint the exact behaviors that deserve recognition.
2. Recognize Customer-Centric Actions in Real Time
While big bonuses at the end of the quarter or year are nice, real-time recognition is more powerful. For instance, employees who receive immediate praise for solving customer issues tend to stay more engaged and motivated. That’s why employee incentives should include immediate recognition.
It doesn’t have to be complicated! Here are a few of my favorite ways to acknowledge employees:
How to Acknowledge Desired Behaviors in the Moment
- Shoutout the employee on a Slack channel or other company communication channel
- Highlight the team member at your next department meeting
- Write a private thank you note or email to the employee
- Gamify the process. Create a competition to see which associate can collect the most reviews (or any other goal you have). Keep a scorecard to celebrate each review in real-time and motivate your team.
By recognizing exceptional customer interactions in real-time, you make it clear that CX is part of every employee’s daily responsibilities—and you give them the motivation to keep going above and beyond. On the other hand, failing to acknowledge these actions can lead to a mindset of trying to hit your quotas at the end of each month.
3. Make CX Everyone’s Job—Not Just Sales & Support
Customer experience isn’t just a frontline issue—every department impacts CX. The key is aligning employee incentives across the entire company.
That said, it’s important to find ways to incentivize or emphasize CX-focused behaviors in every role. Here are a few examples:
- Marketing: In addition to measuring clicks and purchases, consider rewarding positive customer interactions or user-generated content. Reward the social media associate who replies to the most comments.
- Operations & Logistics: Recognize employees for reducing order errors or handling issues before they become complaints.
- HR & Training: Reward employees who go above and beyond in mentoring new hires on customer-centric values.
In short, every job description for your company needs to state how the role impacts the customer experience and the key performance indicators that will measure success.
Are Your Employee Incentives Driving the Right Results?
If you want to know whether your company is incentivizing the right behaviors, start by asking:
- Are we rewarding short-term wins or long-term loyalty?
- Do our incentives align with what we want customers to say about us?
- Are we recognizing and celebrating CX-driven actions across the entire company?
Ultimately, the right employee incentives will create a culture where customer experience is a priority at every level.
What’s one new behavior you plan to incentivize?
