The dangers of combining rewards and customer feedback

The Sunday Times, 7 June 2026

As a teenager, I worked at a dry cleaners. A 'professional' dry cleaners as they had on their signage. Occasionally we'd be incentivised to sell membership deals. You might get a gift card for the most sign-ups that week.

So I found a recent article in The Sunday Times interesting on how Vodafone's Trustpilot ratings suddenly went stratospheric and have remained high since 2023. Four and five-star reviews shot up and perhaps not coincidentally incidents of employees writing reviews of themselves in customers' names also began.

What's worrying is that in some cases, the reviews were created by employees when customers had left their phones with them for repair. A serious breach of privacy and probably worse.

Trustpilot says they removed 3,800 reviews last year that were deemed suspicious (though not necessarily all written by Vodafone staff). Vodafone confirmed some staff have been disciplined over writing fake reviews.

It turns out that the big phone company had introduced a scheme whereby shops could receive financial rewards for reviews that mention staff members by name.

Simply put, rewards incentivise behaviours, and in some cases, corrupt. This is why the research world is on the whole opposed to cash for survey responses; it skews participation and encourages fake responses.

It also reminds me of how the legal directories model works. They present themselves as offering independent reviews, but the client feedback they collect comes from referees nominated by the firms themselves.

Funnily enough, people tend not to put forward clients for whom they've done poor work – lawyers want to build a strong public reputation. That's not to say they are writing their own reviews, but they do cherry-pick the clients who give the feedback.

Indeed, wherever there is a reward or risk – inflation of, or damage to, reputation, people behave differently to when feedback is private. For this reason, it's important to recognise the difference between asking for testimonials (i.e. public reviews used for promotion) and gathering feedback (candid appraisal and constructive criticism).

When feedback is gathered to enable targeted improvement, the more honest, the better – it is more valuable when it tells you what needs fixing. It's not about signalling to other potential buyers.

One of the biggest mistakes I see firms making is taking a headline performance metric like Net Promoter Score (the likelihood to recommend question) and attaching a financial incentive to it. In no time at all you get people begging clients for particular scores or else advising them what it means to give a score of six versus a seven. Who wouldn't if getting your bonus or even just keeping your job depends on a quota of nine or 10 out of 10 ratings?

Back when I worked at the dry cleaners, there were no online review platforms. Reputation inflation via social media didn’t exist. There was word of mouth, modest sales incentives and pride in doing the job properly. Looking back, perhaps that is what ‘professional’ really meant. Not just the technical ability to remove stains from fabric, but the integrity to do the right thing for the customer, regardless of who might later hear about it.

For professional services firms, leaders should be clear on how different the two exercises are and go about them appropriately. If you want public testimonials, then by all means let partners choose safe, happy clients. If you want useful information to improve the business, don’t punish partners when they receive constructive criticism and don’t make their bonus based on it either – either one creates an incentive to game the system.

The best thing to do is to reward participation. Praise those professionals who nominate the highest proportion of their clients. The partners who put forward all of their clients in a ‘warts and all’ approach are the ones to celebrate.