Sins of Commission

I have never worked in an environment that commission was the basis of salary (luckily) because that shouldn’t be the driving force for customer service. After reading the article on Sins of Commission, it is very evident that individuals working in the incentive-pay organizations are not there to assist customers because they take pride in there work. Customers are seen a walking paycheck and sucking-up is a must in order to gain the commission. For example in the reading, when the author told the salesperson at the Toyota car sale’s lot that he would probably not make a purchase that afternoon, the sales rep brushed him off. This seems like a common behavior that most sales associate would do, at least the one’s that I have encountered shopping in a high priced department store. Disregarded the presence of unlikely buyers and focus their attention on other customers who were more willing to make a purchase.

I see this type of behavior to be very prevalent in high-class boutique shops in California where most sales associates earn their income on meeting sales quotas. The first thing that comes out of their mouth is “Is there anything that I can help you with?” and if the customer says “no,” they usually ignore them, thinking “I’m not going to gain anything from this browsers” and find other potential consumer. A general flaw these associates overlook is the fact that customers who go to these stores browsing, shopping, looking around are doing that for a reason. They might selective in the decision making process, but eventually they will make a purchase and when that time comes around, friendly customer service is what they’ll remembers. For those associates that consider choosy buyers to be unworthy of their time and effort, they are losing prospective sales when they turn their backs on customers that don’t buy on site.

The article also includes a section on employees’ regard to salary. People are motivated by more important factors such as job satisfaction than money. In fact, people in most surveys rank salary at the bottom of the list as one of many reasons why they remain at a company. I would agree with Maslow’s hierarchy of need that people would require an adequate salary in order to live comfortably. According to Maslow, after acquiring the initial lower of physiological, safety and security needs, job satisfaction would provide fulfillment for social and esteem needs.

I found the quote given by George Zimmerman, founder and CEO of Men’s Warehouse to be very effective in accurately describing the focal point for incentive pay: “you want incentives to be just large enough but not too large…you want the reward to be large enough to be notice…but not so large that they begin to drive distort behavior.” When presented with a raise, people will feel the significant advantage for the first 30 days, and then after that feel disappears and working is back to normal. Money is a temporary motivator at best.