iDEA - Link Employee Feedback to Customer Benefits

Space-a-spade, most customer-benefits that are at the discretion of store staff do to placate a kind of customer that, honestly, one could do without. But tell me something, have you been to hotels where you have been nice to the staff and the staff to you? Then when you visit them again, they remember you and sometimes 'pull a few strings' for that upgrade or meal voucher? You probably don't know if the reverse has happened - when you shouted at the waiter and had your soup spat in. 

So what I'll propose here isn't completely new, but it still is, somewhat. 

What about recording the views of your staff against the customer's loyalty record so that you can reward the better people, not just the blackmailers, the churn-risks and the highest spenders (well, rewarding the highest spender happens rarely - loyalty programs  are frequently to reward the worst customers - but more on that some other time). The implicit, anecdotal, ad-hoc, hyper-local version of this anyway works, as described in the beginning of the article, but one could make it organized so that the information, like other loyalty information, is available across the points of service. This may not just reward the good guys, but help identify the serial offenders - those that slip in the strand of hair to get their meals free, those that stain the bed-sheet to get the champagne, those who think waitresses enjoy being flirted with and so on. 

Today these guys walk free of their past, actions remembered only for a short while by the particular people who encountered them till those particular people are in the same establishment and so on. This simple change in the customer record could take away their invisibility. The next time the customer walks into your bank, hotel, restaurant or shop - the screen will flash on the reception. And who knows, maybe in the long run, when you take away anonymity,    

I'm not sure if I've thought of all dimensions. Maybe there's more. Maybe there's potential for misuse, but that's like asking if you would trust your employees to give fair reviews. Maybe this system is against sometimes-nasty-but-overall-nice people or now-reformed people who are, like all of us others, noticed and remembered more for the bad than the good - but that's just a calibration issue. I don't know - sometimes it seems like an idea that should already exist, sometimes as something that needs more thought. 

What do you think?

ps: of-course at the base of it all is still the question around whom does your loyalty program reward - the bad customer (which is usually the case) or the good kind that you want more of. If you haven't answered that yet, read this post once you have.