Dealership CSI scores: perfect or nothing -- WHY?

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I know dealership satisfaction surveys and CSIs are critically important for employees' pay, whether they stay employed, etc. I've filled out several of them honestly, including a lot of 8/10 or 9/10 when I thought things were done not perfectly but very well. But since then, I've read a lot of articles that say anything less than a perfect score might as well be a zero.

So, my question is, WHY is anything less than a perfect score unacceptable?

Is it because most customers reliably put 10/10 unless the experience was a total disaster, leaving numbers 1 through 9 to mean varying degrees of "bad"? Are the folks who think 8/10 or 9/10 means "really really good" just a small minority?

Is there just so much competition among dealerships and salespeople that they have to set standards that high?

Some other reason?
 
Same way where I work.
Customer surveys must be all 5's or it's a bust.
2nd place is just first loser.
And they want perfection while pushing experience out the door, and bringing in self serving youngn's that think they deserve everything for nothing, which, co-incidentally is where the surveys come from.
 
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The system is set up to screw the dealer and the dealer employees over. On Ford's survey there is a question that asks "Do you love your dealer?" if the customer does not answer "absolutely agree" the entire survey is a complete failure.

Those surveys end up in the JD Power and Associates awards and that is what they care about. The manufacturers put a lot of available money to the dealers in the results of the surveys. The dealers then tie the results to the service writers, now parts department, pay.
 
Originally Posted By: bdcardinal
The system is set up to screw the dealer and the dealer employees over. ... there is a question that asks "Do you love your dealer?" if the customer does not answer "absolutely agree" the entire survey is a complete failure.


That's so wrong.

It's like these little electronic payment kiosks that have "tip buttons" that START at 20% & go UP from there!!

Sometimes.... I feel if the service wasn't worth 20%, then you should get no tip if that's the options....
 
I worked for 2 different Honda dealerships, both would not pay bonuses to their employees if:

1. Every CSI wasn't filled out.

2. Every CSI didn't have a perfect score.

Total B-S. I left the first Honda dealer, when they decided to implement the strategy at one of their Saturday morning meetings. When I went over the the second Honda dealer and asked during the interview I was told they had the same policy. I said no thanks, and was offered to sell used cars only. I jumped at that! More money less grief and no problems hitting the bonus. The system was used to screw the sales staff out of money.
 
When I bought my Frontier a month back, the sales guy sat down with a survey copy and went over step by step with a highlighter showing me what they wanted/needed checked off on the survey. To be fair, the sales guy was good and no issues with the buying experience, just sobering watch them grovel, begging and hand carrying a customer to the result they want.
 
My salesperson called after the sale and begged me to do the survey sent by email. He said that is how he got paid. I did give him good ratings. Not sure it was 100% positive. Have not heard from him since then. I was also getting all kinds of discount coupons until I finished my JD Power survey for dealership. Now nothing.
 
Originally Posted By: Linctex
Originally Posted By: bdcardinal
The system is set up to screw the dealer and the dealer employees over. ... there is a question that asks "Do you love your dealer?" if the customer does not answer "absolutely agree" the entire survey is a complete failure.


That's so wrong.

It's like these little electronic payment kiosks that have "tip buttons" that START at 20% & go UP from there!!

Sometimes.... I feel if the service wasn't worth 20%, then you should get no tip if that's the options....



Amen!
 
The salesman at a Nissan dealership where I bought a new 2006 Altima told me the same. That I would receive a survey and anything less than top marks would mean zero even though the scale would be 0-10 for the different questions on the survey.

Last year I bought a 3 year old Toyota from a Toyota dealership but don't recall a survey, so maybe it only applies to new car sales?
 
Same here as well. Not an auto dealer or auto-related, but we deal with the public. We did a survey and if a score was not 9/10 or 10/10, we were required to address the reasons with our supervisor and contact the customer as to what the problem was. I had one 8/10, and the customer told me there was no problem at all, they just didn't give high scores on these surveys. Meanwhile, I (and others) had to deal with the ensuing "crisis" internally. Would be funny if not playing with people's livelihoods.
 
Originally Posted By: d00df00d
I know dealership satisfaction surveys and CSIs are critically important for employees' pay


Seems kind of JD Power'esque. Arbitrary junk rankings like that are fine and all, but when people's livelihoods are now rested on such incompetent metrics, this is where problems arise. No es bueno
 
This is not unique to the automotive sales industry. Basically, any time you are asked to complete one of those multiple choice surveys which use phrases like "Completely Agree", "Somewhat Agree", etc., you can bet the business that uses its results is treating them with the same insane 'all or nothing' approach discussed here.

I think it is asinine, and I cannot think of any scenario in which it is not mostly counterproductive for all those involved.

However, having said that, I did read an article somewhere once (Consumerist.com maybe?) that was written by a manager in some business somewhere that used these types of surveys, and he laid out the case for treating their results in this fashion. While I cannot remember the specifics of his argument, I do remember thinking, "that's interesting, I never thought of looking at it from that perspective."

But seeing as it wasn't persuasive enough to stick in my memory several years later, I guess it wasn't as good of an argument as it needed to me.
 
Originally Posted By: The_Nuke
However, having said that, I did read an article somewhere once (Consumerist.com maybe?) that was written by a manager in some business somewhere that used these types of surveys, and he laid out the case for treating their results in this fashion. While I cannot remember the specifics of his argument, I do remember thinking, "that's interesting, I never thought of looking at it from that perspective."

See, this is the kind of thing I want to read. I completely agree that the system seems insane, and this thread is a great example of every discussion I've seen so far on this topic -- i.e. uniformly negative. And yet it persists, which means there MUST be a reason, even if it's a stupid one.

If you stumble across this article again, please post it here!
 
More companies have started adopting a net promoter score, which takes the % of results that 9s/10s minus the % that are 6 or lower.

Not sure how auto would adopt since they juice the baseline so much.
 
On our most recent purchase, the sales guy, who really didn't do all that much to get the business, begged us to give the highest possible evaluation on every question asked on the survey.
I wan the guy to get paid and to make a living, so we did complete the survey as he requested.
If the manufacturer really wanted honest answers, then they wouldn't hold this Sword of Damocles over the heads of dealer personnel.
Here was a case where we were happy with the overall buying experience and would have recommended the dealer to anyone, but the manufacturer apparently considers anything less than a level of perfection never attained by mortal men to be unacceptable.
Why?
No good reason for any seller of anything who wants honest feedback which they can use to improve aspects of the experience to promote this, and they must know that the dealer staff will work the system by asking customers to rate everything as a perfect ten.
The term fools' paradise comes to mind.
 
Bingo - it's the NPS (Net Promoter Score), which has been the darling metric of the bean-counter set for 5 years or so. Originally, it was an attempt to quantify how likely a customer was to recommend a service to those in their circle, and if the surveys were answered completely honestly it might just do that.

As noted here, the process has been corrupted by middle management's desire to "win" at all costs, which means gaming the system. Then you get line employees (field techs, salesmen, etc.) that get pressured to beg the customer for a perfect score. It's a bad deal all around. No one likes to grovel, and few enjoy being the recipient of that sort of thing.

My company provides field service for a major telecom provider, and this has been part of every interaction for years. Our management first tried to use the requirement as an opportunity for the tech to make sure each customer was fully satisfied with their service for that appointment. That only works in a perfect world. In reality, customers get upset for reasons outside of a tech's control, and those reasons will always impact a survey that is only supposed to measure the tech's performance. Techs are now explicitly told to ask for the "10 or nothing". Predictably, this came about as our customer decided NPS was going to be one of the metrics that they utilized when determining whether we qualified for financial incentives built into our contract.
 
Originally Posted By: The_Nuke
This is not unique to the automotive sales industry. Basically, any time you are asked to complete one of those multiple choice surveys which use phrases like "Completely Agree", "Somewhat Agree", etc., you can bet the business that uses its results is treating them with the same insane 'all or nothing' approach discussed here.

...

Press Ganey for hospitals is the same. Somebody gets told by dietary they can't have a specific food due to doctors orders (like a diabetic not being given ice cream) and they give them low mark, and the whole survey is marked as negative.
Make me as an employee feel "what's the point" if one invalid gripe makes everything else done moot.
 
Originally Posted By: FermeLaPorte
I just give less than 10 if they don't offer me water, food, or if I feel they are too pushy or braggy

You expect salespeople to feed you?
 
Don't be such a Cheap Charlie.

Originally Posted By: Linctex
Originally Posted By: bdcardinal
The system is set up to screw the dealer and the dealer employees over. ... there is a question that asks "Do you love your dealer?" if the customer does not answer "absolutely agree" the entire survey is a complete failure.


That's so wrong.

It's like these little electronic payment kiosks that have "tip buttons" that START at 20% & go UP from there!!

Sometimes.... I feel if the service wasn't worth 20%, then you should get no tip if that's the options....
 
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