How company targets are making customers' lives a nightmare

Our writer says it’s time for companies to prioritise service and quality not just sales and efficiencies.

Targets make absolute sense if you’re a business. If you want to maintain sales to a certain level or if you have goals for growth then you need to be able to measure whether or not you’ve been successful.

I have no issue with corporations setting business targets.

However, I do have an issue with the impact this can have on customers and I believe it is time for responsible businesses to change the way they implement their internal goals.

After all, the most common targets customers are likely to come up against will be sales targets rather than service targets.

More companies make sales a priority than customer experience.

The next likely target is efficiency. Can you get customers through the door or off the phone as fast as possible? Can you do more with even less?

Once again, customer experience is what is likely to suffer.

But responsible companies need to behave differently, because sales targets can hurt consumers. Here are just a few recent examples.

When targets go wrong

There are too many sales target horror stories to list them all.

But a few major examples will show just how damaging targets can be to customers. And I don’t mean annoying or frustrating or increasing the chances of a rip-off, I mean actually damaging.

Take house builders. In February this year Bovis Homes said it would be paying £7 million to repair poorly constructed new properties.

Furious and outraged customers had flocked to a Facebook group dedicated to highlighting cases of poor construction.

The company was accused of pressuring customers to move into unfinished homes, even offering them cash incentives to complete before the properties were properly finished.

Yet when they arrived in their new homes, some complained that they were seriously faulty, sometimes even fitted with the wrong fixtures. One family told The Guardian that they had not been advised their home was still unfinished until an hour after completion.

The company has admitted letting customers down and that it cut corners in efforts to achieve ambitious sales targets. It has promised to change and improve.

Then take PPI. Payment protection insurance has become a byword for target-driven miss-selling as advisers were incentivised to sell cover alongside loans.

How to reclaim PPI

As a result, thousands of people were pressured into taking on expensive financial products, even when they were not suitable or not what the customers actually wanted.

Many people thought they had to take PPI as a condition of the loan they needed. It is a prime example of sales targets trumping everything else – and now the banking industry is paying for it with billions set aside for compensation.

Those are just two big examples; in so many industries where sales are made the absolute priority you, time and again, see staff cutting corners and failing customers as they try to reach their targets.

Need a mortgage? Compare rates today

So what can we do?

There will always be sales targets for any business that has an eye to growth and that’s okay.

It is understandable that firms will set targets for their sales teams and even that they will incentivise those sales teams to reach those targets.

Don’t worry - I fully understand that this is part of business and is unlikely to change anytime soon.

However, I would like to see companies pledging to take steps that ensure such targets do not negatively affect their customers.

Perhaps there could be some sort of formal pledge they take to ensure that their KPIs don’t cause their customers harm.

They could even have some sort of badge or banner to display to prove they have taken such an ethical step, in a similar manner to the Fairtrade or the positive about disabled people ‘two ticks’ scheme.

So I’ve been thinking about what kind of commitments companies would have to make to ensure their customers are never harmed by their growth plans.

I’m interested to hear your ideas for consumer protection from sales targets; just share your thoughts in the comments beneath.

Here’s what I came up with in the meantime:

• Sales targets will never impact quality, with extra quality audits at any time targets become extra pressured e.g. at the end of sales periods
• Sales targets will never exist in isolation, there will always be quality and service targets alongside them
• Those quality targets will be given equal priority to sales targets
• Bonuses will never be paid on the basis of sales figures alone
• Customer complaints will be measured and action taken if there is any uplift in complaints at the end of sales periods

Now, maybe this is just wishful thinking. But companies need to know that customers are fed up with being poorly served by corporate targets.

And businesses should also recognise that responding to that can be a huge draw for customers.

Need a mortgage? Compare rates today

There is hope

Last year the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) surveyed 10,000 UK customers about their priorities.

It discovered that staff attitude and behaviour has become far more important to them than it was five years previously.

The latest UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) published by the ICS shows that over the last five years when customer satisfaction increases or decreases, share price follows suit.

It analysed 42 major retailers over the last five years and found that in 60% of cases, when satisfaction fell share price then fell too.

Jo Causon, chief executive of the ICS, said: “In each of the last 11 UKCSI reports, dating back to July 2012, we have consistently seen evidence that supermarkets with the highest customer satisfaction outperform the sector average for sales and market share.

“Although it seems obvious that customers are key to business performance, service strategy can often fall by the wayside in boardroom conversations. The UKCSI report offers a clear imperative to put customer satisfaction first.”

There you go, it makes good business sense to stop fixating on sales and profit margins at the expense of service, experience and positive customer outcomes.

Causon concludes: “The findings from this report paint a clear picture for UK plc: place the customer at the centre of business strategy, or risk losing out to those who do.”

There are tough times ahead for all UK businesses. Ultimately, customer satisfaction could be key to whether or not they weather any storms.

What do you think? Have you felt rushed or fobbed off because of sales targets? Is it fantasy to think that firms could begin to focus more on happiness and service? Have your say using the comments below.