Are You Gaming Your Way To Failure?

I think some companies and some people will game the system without even knowing they're doing it. Yeah, I think sometimes it's done with good intent in helping them make great decisions or give good feedback or whatever the case may be. But in fact, what they might be doing is actually gaming the system.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. Today we're talking about gaming. No, not Nintendo, Xbox or Sony, though Carrie and I would love to do an episode on that as well. Today we're talking about all the different ways you can game in that promoter system. And in this episode we tell you why most gaming is probably bad for your program. How to spot the different types of gaming, and yes, even how to eliminate gaming altogether and still incentivize the right activity. We love talking about this topic. So without further ado, let's dive right in. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode. I'm here as always with my co host, Kerry T. Self. How you doing, Kerry?

I'm doing great. Hello, everybody.

And the rumors are true. We took a week off last week. How'd it feel, Kerry?

We took a week off?

Yeah, kind of. We didn't do an episode last week, right?

Oh, okay, okay. I was here. I don't know where you were. I was just. I just kept talking without you, I guess.

Well, we'll have to get that out for everybody to, to download, but so we're happy to be back and I think we picked up a good amount of subscribers last week, so this episode should be really exciting. We're going to talk about gaming your system. And what we mean by that is gaming your net promoter program, your account experience program, your customer experience program, whatever it is, gaming it to get a higher score, why you shouldn't do it in the first place. We're going to cover that. But also, like different ways that we've seen companies game the system that you can look out for if you have an internal program in place to kind of just mitigate those types of issues. So, Kerry, let's kick it off grand scale here. Why is gaming just not great for your system?

I think we all have to go back to the beginning of why we're doing this. And if you genuinely want a program that is transparent, that gives you information to make the best, best decision, then you want honest feedback. As much as it might hurt or as much as it might punch you in the gut, you need to know what it is your customers think of you. And I think a lot of companies lose track of that somewhere along the way, and they begin to worry about getting a higher score or making it look better than it is. And that might feel good. That might even help a bonus or a promotion down the road, if that's what it's tied to. But at the end of the day, what you have is some data that's not necessarily going to help you be very strategic.

We talk about this word a lot on this podcast, which is fear. People fear that feedback. And I think that's literally step one is like overcoming the fact that you're gonna get some really rough feedback. I mean, that's like, pretty tough for a lot of companies. They kind of shy away from that type of thing because they just want to, you know, put their head in the sand and just keep doing what they're doing. But I think that's really step one is admitting that, you know, what we're doing this for a reason is to get honest, unadulterated feedback into the company and improve our business as a result. And I think overcoming that fear is not to be underestimated, in my opinion. What are your thoughts on that?

It sounds like we're at a Survey Anonymous meeting here, right? I'm Gary, and I'll admit it, I'm a surveyaholic. But, yeah, I think you're right. Imagine being a champion or even a senior sponsor on your executive suite, and you turn to your company and go, all right, guys, I have this really great idea. We are going to pull the curtain back, and we're going to ask people what they really think of us. And by the way, we're not going to do it. We're going to ask you guys to go out there and lead the charge. And then here's another cool tidbit. As that feedback comes in, we're going to base your performance on that, and we're going to ask you to close the loop. And it almost sounds absurd in so many ways, but it is at the core and the heart of what a good relationship should be. And I think, and this is not everyone, but I do think a lot of companies over the years have created this false sense of a healthy, good relationship. And I think gaming the system is another way to make it look like it's a lot better than it really is and really getting to the core of the truth. And it's scary. It's a ton of fear. You don't know how many times I've been on a call or asking someone to do this. And immediately there's a long laundry list of why this is not going to work or some suggestions to help improve the score.

Yeah. And I think, listen, if we're in the survey. Anonymous I am going to admit, you know, hi, my name's Ian. Like I have a problem but it's. Yeah. So I've done a lot of these things and it's going to be an interesting episode because like I said before, I didn't do anything perfectly at my previous role. But there are some things where I definitely tried to game the response and looking back, I don't think it helped anything to be honest. It really was more for internal reporting. Like I wanted to make sure the numbers looked good for management and that is just flawed, flawed, flawed from the start. So I'm kind of excited to get into this because I have some interesting stories and I'm sure you do too, Kerry.

So I was gonna ask who's going first? Oh my God, who's diving in with that horror story?

All right, so I think there's like two buckets here, right? There's at least two buckets we're going to cover today. There's probably a version 2 of this episode but response rate related. So like things you do to game to get a response or a higher response or a better score and then there's things that you can do to like game the sample. Right. So like getting rid of different things like detractors and neutrals for another different reasons. Like I didn't really understand it. We'll get into that. But let's start with response rates and response related gaming. So Kerry, what do you think is like let's just go through the list. Right. So what do you think the first one is for gaming response?

Well, I think one of the, one of the first things I've seen, I've seen this personally. I'd say we've done it too in the past. And I'll use the word cherry picking. And I think what we do is we sometimes hand off the responsibility of surveying our accounts, our customers, the people we relate with to the actual account owners on the front line. And what they'll do is they will literally filter through their list. And you know, I've had team members actually say, oh no, we're not going to survey him. He never gives a good score. Oh this group here, they never respond. Why don't we just pull them off and literally they start to map out if we're talking response rate, it's even forget about the score, just the response rate. You start to see this process of. And then what happens is your sample starts to shrink of who you survey or worse coverage.

So your sample shrinks, but also your revenue coverage shrinks considerably too.

Exactly. Because who's gonna be most critical? Those that spend the most money with you. Right. And we just, we take this approach of, like, when we, when we turn that over ourselves have seen this, we go from having a very small sampling that makes us feel really good, kind of a pat on our back, but then it's like we're not even touching our customer base completely.

So I think that's. That's a big one, because I hate to. I'm a marketer, right? So any chance I can throw sales under the bus, I'll take it. But. No, but it's, it's. You're right, though. Like, it's human nature. Whether it's a marketing person, a csm, they're gonna choose the people that they think they have the best possibility of getting a good score or response from. It's like, in marketing terms, we generally try not to send to our disengage contacts, right? So there are stats that we have that are higher because we're only sending to the people that open our stuff. But there's this whole other activity we can go into that's like warming up your. Your disengaged contacts. That should happen. You shouldn't shy away from it. You should just have maybe a different plan to get them warmed up anyways. But I think you're right. If you give people the choice to. If you leave it up to them, they're going to choose the easy route, which is like, hey, I know Joe at this account is going to give me a 10 almost every time. So let's just survey him and get it over with. So, yeah, that's. That's a difficult one to overcome. So how can people actually address that, Carrie?

Well, you know what we preach again. You see it on my chest. We always like to let people know we are customer gauge. This is what we do. We help companies get better at this. But Automate, I would, you know, find a system that is not going to be biased in any way. Take a look at that account. Make sure that you look at your revenue for each of those. Those accounts that you have. And how many people are you going to survey from each of those? And some accounts might be two or three people, some might be 10 or 20 people, but create that formula. All of your account owners out in the front line are going to have that same number. And basically, if you can automate it in any Way possible, take the human factor out of it. It's a great way to eliminate that cherry picking of who should I send it to, how often Create something that is repetitive, that is automated and definitely takes away the urge of saying no, no, no, don't survey.

And it's also interesting too when you pair the automation and that doesn't mean eliminate the human element, what it does is it gives you a first cut, right? So literally automation gets sent out, so everybody gets the survey and then it's up to basically management to say, hey, you know, we're really lacking on responses from this tier of revenue. And then it becomes like a human kind of follow up process with the CSM or the ae, whatever it is, you can use them both kind of in tandem, which I think is honestly where the real magic happens.

Yeah, we just had this conversation this morning, right. We had a whole leadership meeting and we talked about their senior sponsor wasn't present on that last call or in that last survey group. And, and here's the reality. With account experience, you have one person making buying decision, one person who's managing and running the program. And then you have this front line who's the face of your business. And all three of those combined are who you want feedback from because they're all going to tell you something different about why they find you valuable.

It gets even more interesting when you get into these bigger accounts too. Sometimes it's like more than, it's like three or four people make the decision to buy and it can get very complex. So your point of like getting it from all angles is very much a valid one. All right, so make sure you're not cherry picking. What's your second, your second gaming system that people should look out for.

I once had a group of people who were intentionally putting in or making emails bad. So we had a, we had a loyalty program. And you know, we all know why we do loyalty, right? It's to entice people to spend more money, stay loyal, you know, in different ways, recognizing them for what they do for us. And what we were finding was the people in the loyalty program are giving us much lower scores, which was ironic. Here we are doing something nice for you. What we learned though was these people were more critical. There's a reason why they're loyal, but they have higher expectations, they have a much deeper relationship with us. But the scores were miserable and this was really hurting people out in the field. So we literally had somebody going, I'm laughing because it's so painful. Literally going in and changing and tweaking people's emails by one letter, one name. Little things that would be very hard for us to pick up on. And we couldn't figure out they started to bounce or we started to get. People come back to us and go, what? Why did you email me this? So how we discovered it was we knew we had a problem because again, our response rate was dropping off. Well, it stayed the same. But then all of a sudden we noticed we had a bounce back is really where we saw it. And then it just opened up the floodgate. We're like, what is happening here? What's going on? So it's eye opening to see the level of creativity that people will go through, increase their score.

Yeah, that's crazy. So just the email so they'll bounce so you don't get a score. Oh my God.

You know, if you can, if you don't get a detractor, you perceive that as good. But Ian, I think this speaks to like what we talk about, that there's this whole segment of your audience. Silence is just as deadly as a detractor could be. And you know, you got to pay attention to those that don't respond. You can't just be happy with 20% of your audience, 30% of your ons giving you feedback. You have to ask, why is that 80 to 70% not giving you the feedback, what's going on there? And dig a little deeper.

And we spent a ton of time on that at cg. Just internally is like, we are very concerned about that audience that is just for some reason not responding. That's, that's, I mean, we've been doing this long enough to know that's a pretty good sign of churn. Right. So if they're ignoring you, we're or they're not using the product. We have a bunch of different signals we track, but keeping your pulse, your finger on the pulse of that type of activity is super important, more so than most people actually expect. So solution or the lesson there is to monitor your sending stats, I take it. So make sure that you're, you're not getting increased bounce rates, things like that.

Yeah, whatever engine you're using to drive the results and to get these surveys in, make sure it has some type of reporting that can tell you that, you know, who you sent to. I'm just laughing still because I'm thinking about it, but you gotta be able to see that. And you know, I think this is where you don't get, you know, really excited over a high nps. Score, you say, okay, that's great. We'll take that and we'll look at the feedback. But make sure you can look at who am I sampling? What's the response rate? My getting that representation is very, very. So, I mean, that's. That's another report you should run pretty regularly and take a look at.

Yeah, great feedback. I think that's another really good one that I actually didn't know that one, to be honest. I thought I've encountered it all, but I learned something today, so thanks for that one. What's your next.

I hope we're not teaching people bad practices.

This could backfire. Not gonna lie.

Let's. Can we put a disclaimer on this one?

With great power comes great responsibility. Right? So what's your next one? What do you got?

You know, I think in speaking to your fear, also, I think also the one that I always see is like, is following up with non respondents. So I think this was a big one. I've been in the retail world for a long time, and even in account experience, I've seen it too, in both sides where you get some tough feedback or you get somebody who doesn't respond at all. And what we really practice is, is they deserve a little reminder, a little nudge, hey, here from you. And sometimes people go, oh, thank God, he didn't respond, you know, or they can be so tough, you know, and we all have that customer, that client, that they're huge, they're big spenders, they're important accounts to us from a financial perspective. But, man, do they tear you up on the feedback side. And you get a six from them or seven from them, and you celebrate. It's like, oh, my God, what a great score. But those are the ones that people have a tendency to go, maybe I won't remind them, Maybe I won't respond to that. And I think that's where you really start to dive in and say to yourself, I think there's two things you need to do with that is, number one, make sure you have very clear targets for your team. This is what we expect from you on response rate and make sure everyone's playing from that same target. I know we've talked about this before, but a program without targets, without goals is doomed to fail. And everyone needs to know what that target is. The other thing I would say with that is, is to make sure you educate your team why this feedback is important.

There you go.

Yeah, go back and I'll use your word again. I know, Ian, we've thrown this around a lot on these podcasts, but fear, yeah, you know, most poor behavior comes from a fear place.

It's true.

And if you can tell them, look, this, this is not about you losing your job. You lose your job when you don't do your job well. This is about us not having a job for you if you don't do your job really well. And we want to give you tools to help you do it better. We want to give you tools to help you grow sales. And if you, if someone doesn't rally and champion around that, if somebody doesn't want to open up a dialogue with their business partners to get more feedback, you probably have the wrong employee anyway. So if the education doesn't work in being transparent and saying, look, we want honest, true feedback and the gaming continues, you got the wrong employee. You don't have the wrong customer. You have the wrong employee for sure.

But you wouldn't know that unless you're tracking targets on that employee.

You got it.

Good point on that one. Also, something interesting you brought up. Targets and response rates, 100% agreement. But it gets kind of interesting when you target like scores to your point before, like when some clients give you a six, you jump through the roofs because it's a good score for them. This episode of the Account Experience podcast is sponsored by Customer Gaze, the leading B2B account experience software that ties revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric decisions that drive revenue growth. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail? Believe it or not, it's lack of C suite buy in. In CustomerGage's research with MIT, they found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C suite is to actually align with what they can care about most, which is revenue. That's why CustomerGage is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken, uh, yeah, we get a good amount of FreeBear1 login, Iron Mountain, H&R Block, SuperOffice and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue actively being managed in Customer gauge, yeah, that's billion. With a B, they're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In Such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on feedback quickly across multiple departments, divisions or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well with account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback from multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with a churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. CustomerGage's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing. If you want to see Customer Gauge in action, go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. Today you won't regret it. We found that country to country scores can change. So for example, Germany, Netherlands, they're very harsh on their scores. It's like if you get a seven from them, you are right. You jump through the roof. Because it's a good score for a person out of Germany or a Dutchy. I mean it really, it does depend on the country. So that's like a whole episode in and of itself. So I don't know if we need to dive into that, but I just thought I'd throw that out there because it is kind of a. I've always been fascinated by that, where the cultural effect on the score is actually pretty vast.

I think we need a Mythbusters too. And I think you're right though that there are certain regions that just score slightly differently. But remember, you're not competing against another country, you're not competing in another region, you're competing against yourself and throw the score out for a minute. And what did they tell you in that score? Because some of our best comments come from those countries also.

Yes, correct.

Some of our best feedback. And this is feedback that we've used to make strategic decisions and changes in our own organization.

Yes, exactly. And I say very true. I mean, usually the tough score is followed by a very thoughtful comment by the person. So anyways, back to gaming the system. All right, what else we got here? So I think let's maybe jump to getting more responses. Right. So I'm going to jump in here with my first one because, again, I've had a good amount of experience doing this. We used to send out a direct mail letter to everybody that was about to get the survey. And honestly, and I'm ashamed of this, but asked for a 10. Like, literally, we hope your service was a 10 out of 10, literally word for word. And we would send it out and about two or three days after it lands, we would send a survey. Now, that's bad for a bunch of different reasons, mentioning the 10 out of 10, prepping it. I mean, there's a ton of things wrong with it, but I think there is something to be said about reminding people there's a survey coming. So I think that's a good side of it. The intention there was good, but I think that the execution was maybe just a little misguided. So that one, actually we did see a big uptick in our tens. No shocker there. At the end of the day, guys, I'm a marketer, right? So, like, I can't help myself on things like that. But yeah, so that, that definitely did affect our score in a positive way, but I think our underlying business metrics and our underlying business growth did not jump proportionately with that score increase. And I'm, if I remember correctly, I'm 100%. Yeah. Did it did not correlate. So that was interesting. So that was a big lesson for me where if you prep people, you'll get the score, but it doesn't necessarily mean the business metrics. Come one to one with that. What are your thoughts on that one, Kerry?

It's funny, we were just talking a little earlier and literally this morning during the whole onboarding process. And what we do here at Customer Gauge is get people comfortable with being uncomfortable. Right? You're about to get some scores that are going to scare the hell out of everyone. And that's a good thing. But we're preparing you ahead of time. And one of the, one of the approaches that this company wanted to take this morning was why don't we go ahead and first off, let's do some training for our customers. Let's teach them why they need to give us a 9 out of 10. So already my inner alarm is screaming like, oh, my God, this is, this is not why you bought us. Please stop. It's so much more than that. And then maybe we do the first survey with them. Maybe we get on a meeting like this and we actually do the survey with them and we ask them face to face. And I'm like, wow, talk about uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable just hearing the idea. But the reality is I think some people disconnect the goal again. The goal is not to get that great score. The goal is to get unsolicited true feedback. And you're fighting years and years of research on this. This was not someone's bright idea late at night one night and said they would try it. There were groups that were repeatedly tested and data that they looked at and what they found was that 9 and 10 is sacred for a reason. They are willing to refer you. This was, I mean, if someone's willing to refer you to other people, that means they were ultimately loyal to you and that they were committed to you. They would spend more, stay longer. There was so much research done into this that once you start to educate and take that edge off of the customer, then now they're not acting from that unsolicited true feedback. You know, I'm here to tell you seven and eights aren't bad guys. It's a good score too. Celebrate those. But nine and tens are really going to help you grow your business. You can't force people to be nines and tens. You can't convince them to be 9 and tens. They have to be a man.

So there's two things I want to unpack there. So you talked about educating basically potential customers on the scale and the categories of the net promoter score. So basically saying this is, these are passives, these are detractors, these are promoters that in and of itself they have to understand why we're sending this and what the different categories are will bias the results. I mean, that's, that's the crazy part is that they're going to feel as though they understand where you want them to fall in that scale when you send out that survey. Whereas if this is just 0 to 10, they get to choose on the scale that's in their head. And again, that may go back to different regional differences where certain areas scale that higher or lower. But I think if they, if they understand what's good for the company, nine or 10, they might be a little bit more biased to give a higher score if they know that the person on the other line is looking for that. So that's, that's a really good thing to bring up, Kerry. So thanks for that because I think that's also one that goes under the radar as well as far as gaming.

Well, I think. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

Just gonna say I don't think most people think of that as a gaming when they're trying to educate the customer about what the score is. But 100% is.

Yeah, I was going to say, I think some companies and some people will game the system without even knowing they're doing it. I think sometimes it's done with good intent in helping them make great decisions or give good feedback or whatever the case may be. But in fact, what they might be doing is actually gaming the system. I think another example of this, Ian, is when companies will color code or take that 0 to 10 scale and they'll put super happy faces and bright colors on the 9 and 10 and then they'll use like gray for that neutral and it's just kind of like an okay face. And then they'll put miserable people in red on the other side of it. And that subtle kind of imagery or any kind of weight that you start to put on that 0 to 10 to give that. That's, that's a gaming the system tactic. And that, that kind of negates the program in a lot of ways.

Yeah, and that's a, that's a really interesting one too, because I've seen that multiple different times from multiple different companies. And, you know, I think I can recognize it because I'm in the space, but I think outside of that, it definitely does skew it a little bit. So that's another great one. Adding colors, adding these really exaggerated faces. You really have to leave it to just 0 to 10 and let them choose. One other one that I thought was interesting that I did back to me in my shameful ways. To be fair to me, this wasn't necessarily my idea, but I didn't fight it too badly, so I probably should have. But when you're on a mobile app on your phone and you get a survey sent out, so it's an email or whatever it is, our survey used to display the score vertically. So 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. From the top of the page down to the bottom, it started at zero. And what's happening is that below the fold? And we had a. We used not to give any free pub, but we used a very manual survey system. It was either a gizmo or a monkey type of survey system. I'll let you guys figure that one out. But the way it displayed was that half the scores were above the fold, which means that your phone was viewing it as soon as you open the page. And then half the scores are below the fold. So you had to scroll down in order to see the second half of this course. And what we did at the suggestion of a salesperson actually was flip it. So the first thing they see was the tens and the nines and the eights and the sevens. They would have to scroll down to get the bad scores. Again, not so shockingly. The scores went up after we did that in a significant manner. But again, the business results, which we'll call it because we did a ton of it, was a larger company. So we could see very visible results if we had a higher score usually. But again, that business result was not tied one to one with the increase in scores. So that was an anomaly again. But we gamed it. We didn't really gain anything in the long run, but we got a ton more tens, which again, if you're. If your goal is to get more tens, great. But ultimately, as we've talked about multiple different times, that's not really the end goal.

Yeah, I'm just imagining the phone thing. This is genius. We became a better company overnight. How did that happen?

So that's something I would not recommend. What do you got, Carrie? Back to you, man. Put the hot spot on you.

Well, I'm going to end at least the last one that I'll share because I think I've already aired enough of my dirty laundry today. But the last one, I'm going to take a little bit from the retail sector. But I see a lot of companies doing this and I think we do it subtly sometimes and sometimes we do it in a very grand gesture. But I think what we do is we either offer rewards or threats. It's the carrot or stick approach. Sometimes I think you have to be cautious if you are going to bonus or put any kind of reward around your program. And I mean this, for any program you do, the minute you start to attach a win money, any kind of reward, you'll see an immediate change in your results. It's the same way of flipping the score. It's the same way as educating the customer who's completing it. Because what happens is people are looking at the prize, not on the data, the information that comes out of it. And if it's going to be response rate, make sure you have all the right pieces in place to make sure it's not happening. If you are going to do it on NPS improvements or driver improvements over time, you know, the things that drive your score, the feedback, make sure that you have all the right checks and balances in place around that. We rolled out a very, very, I wouldn't even say lucrative, but it was a very exciting program at My previous company and one of the things we really wanted to do, we had leaderboards. People's pictures were popping up all over the place. We took this whole kind of sports mentality and we went into this one. And sales is one thing. We want people to be hungry and out there and selling because it's a win win for everyone. If you sell more and the customer's happy, they're gonna come back. And we measured that and we celebrated all those things. But when it came to getting good feedback, when we first started, we didn't have the healthiest check and balance systems in the place place. And we saw somebody go from not getting anything, no feedback or a really poor score to being like light years ahead. And it was so skewing the entire program. And we were paying out these rewards for what I later called just dirty data. It was bad because it was all. It was about getting paid and the challenge. Again, it was a lot like your story, Ian. We looked better, more people were aware of it. It was definitely a great way to educate people on how to ask and how to get it. What it did prove is that we could increase feedback numbers if you really were motivated to do it. But that opened the door to all kinds of funny business that started to happen around that. Every gaming technique you can think of, we saw in this scenario. And I think that made us go back to how do we validate that we are getting good, honest feedback. Automation again, management follow up. The more you can get more biased people involved, unbiased people involved in the process to do a little bit of an audit, to call a couple of those customers and follow up on some of that feedback. The more you can make it more transparent, the more you start to mitigate the risk if you are going to put a bonus or a reward on that program.

Yeah, I completely agree. So I'll give you a couple examples out of my life. So I'm again VP of marketing. I buy a good amount of software. So I do talk to a good amount of SaaS companies and I've had a couple AES and I won't mention names but that have wouldn't say, yeah, I'm gonna say it. They, they pressured the score. So they were very clear and upfront about, hey, I get a bonus. They didn't really say it, but I get, I get basically. How did they phrase? It wasn't bonus, but it was very clear they were making some sort of a bonus out of it.

I get recognized based on something like that where.

Yeah, yeah, but it was Clear. I was like, all right, this guy gets bonused off of this score. And they were like, it means a ton, a ton, a ton to me if you can give me a 10. And they asked for it just like I asked in that letter. But they flat out said, this is very important. My manager looks at this, my CEO looks at this. I get recognized, something like that for the score. And it was clear that, you know, I was going to let this person down. They made it feel like I was going to let this person down. On a personal level. I did not give them an appropriate score and I, I kind of fired back and I mean, this person was a great ae. So honestly, I was going to give them that score anyways. And I kind of was honest with them. I was like, I would have given you that score anyways. But it's, it's tough to hear that type of a line when I'm in the line of work I'm in. And I think they've since changed their ways, that specific rep. But I mean, this is pretty widespread. I'd say in SaaS, some companies, I don't, I won't say everybody, but some companies do a good job in keeping it unbiased and systematic and automated. But I think there is something to be said where when you bonus a rep, they're going to do whatever it takes to get that money because that's, that's literally how we set the system up, right? Like a rep gets paid when they close a deal or get a good score, they're going to do whatever they can in their power to make sure both of those outcomes are fulfilled because they want to get paid. Ultimately, that's their job and that's what they care about is, you know, making more money as a rep. So you do have to be careful. And I'm not saying bonus, bonusing on a program is a bad thing. It can work in certain scenarios. But to your point, you have to be very careful. You have to have good oversight, good management because it can go awry pretty quickly. So that's interesting. And then the other one that came to mind was. So that was a B2B example. I'm going to give a very standard B2C example, which was when I was buying my new car, right? So five years ago when I bought a Jeep Wrangler, I had the rep give me the whole high pressure, if it's not a, they had a 0 to 5 scale, but if it's not a 5, it doesn't count type of deal where they were very clear that it was either a five or nothing. And I was like, all right, well, you weren't a zero, but I wouldn't say you're exactly a five. But they made it very clear too that they get paid if they get a five because that's what they're getting bonused on. So again, and that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, actually, that was, that was the low point of the sale for me was that whole interaction of, you know, it's either a five or nothing. So you do have to be careful because it can have the exact opposite effect of what you intend where you might get that score, but you actually might even create a detractor or passive in the process because the experience overall goes down. So that's, that's a really tough thing to kind of compute in your head. But when you're bonusing people on trying to make the experience better, it might actually backfire on you.

It's a really great point, Ian, that what you end up, it literally backfires. Right. You end up losing the game when you're gaming the system. Right. And you're exactly right. I think now you drive past that dealership and you'll second guess if that's where you want to go to buy that vehicle. And it's. What are we talking about here? We're talking about forming trust, we're talking about growing a lifelong relationship. And yeah, sometimes we put salespeople or account executives out there in front of us to drive sales and drive growth. But do they really have that big picture long term, focus on that, ask the end of that. So yeah, I always say move a caution now. You know, find what works. But make sure you put some systems in place to validate that for sure.

Yeah. Because knowing is half the battle. Right. So for example, and all the examples we gave these are either things that we've encountered ourselves or we've seen some of our early customers do when they're first onboarding. So the more you can identify these internally and start to mitigate the impact they have on your program, the better off you'll be. Because at the end of the day, back to your original point, Carrie. It's about getting unbiased feedback that can be brutally honest and really painful in your program or into your business. Because that's the powerful stuff, that's what you're signing up for. I hate to say it, but if you're fearing that, then you have a bigger issue at hand. But these gaming types of things can happen either deliberately or not. But it's good to know they exist, know what they are, and look out for them because that's, that's half the battle. If you can start to decrease the amount of times these things occur, you'll be well on your path to getting that unbiased feedback into your business. So with that, any closing thoughts on this one, Kerry?

You know, the only thing that popped in my brain there at the end was it's not. If it'll happen, it will. And you gotta identify that. I mean, we didn't even. And there's the one most obvious one that everyone's probably screaming right now at their little device saying, why didn't you mention this one? But you know, people will actually fill out their own survey for themselves. And we just thought that one was so obvious it didn't even need to be brought up. But anything is possible. And you know, if you truly. I think, Ian, you said it perfectly. If you really are talking about growing your business, improving what you do, if you can't handle the truth, you got a bigger problem. I agree 100%.

Yeah.

And being able to be able to put a good system in place that eliminates gaming as much as possible is going to give you that really good data, that really good information that's going to help you run just a great company, a great, phenomenal company, make the right decisions for your, for your team, for your customer.

So, yeah, boom, there it is. That's what it's all about. That's why we're doing this thing. That's why we work at cg. That's ultimately the end mission, right? So, Kerry, great episode. Thank you again, my friends and everybody. If you can subscribe, share it with your friends, we'd love to hear from you. If you want to be a guest. We have a couple special guests lined up in the next couple weeks. So we're really excited about that. But hit us up if you want to be on the show. And thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Sa.