I personally believe CSI is a waste of time.

We all know of dealers who bend the CSI rules in various ways... heck, i bet we could even debate right here what cheating on CSI actually is.  Everyone seems to have a different belief on what is acceptable in encouraging, requesting, or flat out incentivizing customers to give positive scores.  All it takes is one dealership to work the system and the data set is ruined.  Until scores are collected in a more uniform and verified manner, the information will remain tainted.

Unfortunately, dealers must “encourage” customers to submit positive surveys because there is simply too much pressure from OEMs who use CSI for ranking and rewarding stores that dealers cannot afford to let natural results come in.  Face it, CSI is not about measuring customer satisfaction, its about keeping in good political graces with your manufacturer.

Sure OEMs have written rules, outlined consequences and published memos about what is and isn’t acceptable in encouraging customers to return the surveys, but little if anything is done to police or verify the submissions.  Who wants to be the zone manager that enforces the rules only to see their zone numbers tank?  As long as there is false market pressure on “good CSI” and creating real customer loyalty is not the primary reward dealers will shortcut the system resulting in bad data and CSI will continue to be a waste of everyone's time.

The irony of CSI is that if the scores were actually indicative of success I guarantee that dealers would naturally monitor and improve them without encouragement.  The fact that OEMs need to incentivize dealers means there is not enough correlation between good CSI and a dealership’s success.  Either the system doesn’t work and there isn’t a correlation between good CSI and customer loyalty, or OEM involvement has screwed the whole thing up by placing false incentive in the wrong place.  Either way, the system needs to be corrected because its a big resource drain for the industry and those resources could be productively invested elsewhere.


CSI needs to have a greater impact on the market.
Im not convinced that today’s CSI scores, even if they were collected accurately, have enough impact on the market to merit a dealerships full attention.  Rather than start solving the CSI problem with correcting where we put incentives, what if we first put more weight in the market behind the scores by making them public?

If CSI data were accurate, and it could be if the survey collection process changed, OEMs could publish CSI in real time like an online reviews. Yesterday’s CSI is designed to just measure what customers are thinking, but today’s systems in the social web do that so much better and include the added bonus of swaying customers decisions.  Today’s CSI scores should be an aggregate of a variety of verified online review sources.

If we want CSI to matter more, let the market see it.  The correlation between good scores and customer loyalty will strengthen and provide natural incentive for customer satisfaction to increase.  Furthermore, tracking customer sentiment on the web, through a variety of social applications could be a much better indicator of CSI than the narrow view a survey provides.  Our current CSI survey system is so out dated its like trying to use morris code to communicate with an iphone user.  CSI systems need to get with the times. The transparency and effectiveness of the social web is powerful.  Our industry needs to embrace it, after all it has already rendered our current CSI system obsolete.

Move the incentive to the right place.
Once we have tapped into the power of the social web, aggregated a reputation score from a variety of verified sources, and shared internal scores with the market so the scores actually meant something, we would need to completely remove the old incentive structure and focus where our attention should be.

I believe OEMs should remove all incentives and payouts that dealerships earn through good CSI and pay it to dealers who create customer loyalty.  Rather than compare dealerships based on CSI survey results, they should compare dealerships on their ability to retain customers over the years. If the theory is that good customer satisfaction creates customer loyalty, and OEMs want to help dealers create and correlate the loyalty why don’t they put extra dealer cash or another incentive for repeat customers of a dealership? I think this could be more effective because it would force the dealers to EARN loyalty through customer relations.  Unlike a CSI score, you cant really cheat creating repeat business and if you could, bravo, what is the worst that happens? You sell more cars?  We have confused the end with the means and need to refocus on what we really want to accomplish. CSI means nothing if it doesn’t create loyalty.

Making CSI a contest between dealers, and adding big rewards to those dealers who score the best in CSI creates a false goal that is achieved through gaming the system.  If the refocused on selling repeat business, it would solve a lot of problems and remind us why we really track CSI to begin with.

How would you make CSI better?
When it comes to CSI we are like a dog chasing its tail thinking we are actually hunting something worth while.  Like I said earlier, I believe our current CSI system is a waste of time. The best thing manufacturers could do with their CSI surveys is throw them out and start over focusing on the social web then incentivize dealers to create loyalty, not game survey results.  

Im surprised that as an industry we are not more vocal about the lame CSI system that is in place.  Do you feel it benefit's you or is it just a political game that wastes your time?  How would you make CSI better or do you not mind the political tail chasing?

I personally believe CSI is a waste of time.

We all know of dealers who bend the CSI rules in various ways... heck, i bet we could even debate right here what cheating on CSI actually is.  Everyone seems to have a different belief on what is acceptable in encouraging, requesting, or flat out incentivizing customers to give positive scores.  All it takes is one dealership to work the system and the data set is ruined.  Until scores are collected in a more uniform and verified manner, the information will remain tainted.

Unfortunately, dealers must “encourage” customers to submit positive surveys because there is simply too much pressure from OEMs who use CSI for ranking and rewarding stores that dealers cannot afford to let natural results come in.  Face it, CSI is not about measuring customer satisfaction, its about keeping in good political graces with your manufacturer.

Sure OEMs have written rules, outlined consequences and published memos about what is and isn’t acceptable in encouraging customers to return the surveys, but little if anything is done to police or verify the submissions.  Who wants to be the zone manager that enforces the rules only to see their zone numbers tank?  As long as there is false market pressure on “good CSI” and creating real customer loyalty is not the primary reward dealers will shortcut the system resulting in bad data and CSI will continue to be a waste of everyone's time.

The irony of CSI is that if the scores were actually indicative of success I guarantee that dealers would naturally monitor and improve them without encouragement.  The fact that OEMs need to incentivize dealers means there is not enough correlation between good CSI and a dealership’s success.  Either the system doesn’t work and there isn’t a correlation between good CSI and customer loyalty, or OEM involvement has screwed the whole thing up by placing false incentive in the wrong place.  Either way, the system needs to be corrected because its a big resource drain for the industry and those resources could be productively invested elsewhere.


CSI needs to have a greater impact on the market.
Im not convinced that today’s CSI scores, even if they were collected accurately, have enough impact on the market to merit a dealerships full attention.  Rather than start solving the CSI problem with correcting where we put incentives, what if we first put more weight in the market behind the scores by making them public?

If CSI data were accurate, and it could be if the survey collection process changed, OEMs could publish CSI in real time like an online reviews. Yesterday’s CSI is designed to just measure what customers are thinking, but today’s systems in the social web do that so much better and include the added bonus of swaying customers decisions.  Today’s CSI scores should be an aggregate of a variety of verified online review sources.

If we want CSI to matter more, let the market see it.  The correlation between good scores and customer loyalty will strengthen and provide natural incentive for customer satisfaction to increase.  Furthermore, tracking customer sentiment on the web, through a variety of social applications could be a much better indicator of CSI than the narrow view a survey provides.  Our current CSI survey system is so out dated its like trying to use morris code to communicate with an iphone user.  CSI systems need to get with the times. The transparency and effectiveness of the social web is powerful.  Our industry needs to embrace it, after all it has already rendered our current CSI system obsolete.

Move the incentive to the right place.
Once we have tapped into the power of the social web, aggregated a reputation score from a variety of verified sources, and shared internal scores with the market so the scores actually meant something, we would need to completely remove the old incentive structure and focus where our attention should be.

I believe OEMs should remove all incentives and payouts that dealerships earn through good CSI and pay it to dealers who create customer loyalty.  Rather than compare dealerships based on CSI survey results, they should compare dealerships on their ability to retain customers over the years. If the theory is that good customer satisfaction creates customer loyalty, and OEMs want to help dealers create and correlate the loyalty why don’t they put extra dealer cash or another incentive for repeat customers of a dealership? I think this could be more effective because it would force the dealers to EARN loyalty through customer relations.  Unlike a CSI score, you cant really cheat creating repeat business and if you could, bravo, what is the worst that happens? You sell more cars?  We have confused the end with the means and need to refocus on what we really want to accomplish. CSI means nothing if it doesn’t create loyalty.

Making CSI a contest between dealers, and adding big rewards to those dealers who score the best in CSI creates a false goal that is achieved through gaming the system.  If the refocused on selling repeat business, it would solve a lot of problems and remind us why we really track CSI to begin with.

How would you make CSI better?
When it comes to CSI we are like a dog chasing its tail thinking we are actually hunting something worth while.  Like I said earlier, I believe our current CSI system is a waste of time. The best thing manufacturers could do with their CSI surveys is throw them out and start over focusing on the social web then incentivize dealers to create loyalty, not game survey results.  

Im surprised that as an industry we are not more vocal about the lame CSI system that is in place.  Do you feel it benefit's you or is it just a political game that wastes your time?  How would you make CSI better or do you not mind the political tail chasing?