Rob Markey of Bain & Company's global customer strategy and marketing practice wrote a great series of Harvard Business Review articles awhile back on the perils of linking pay to customer feedback. As any of us who've considered using customer feedback metrics in incentive design know, this can be a potential minefield.

Markey's cautionary advice on pay linkage is well written and worth our consideration beyond the boundaries of customer feedback metrics ... before we link anything to pay.

With that in mind, let's consider his five essentials — preconditions for trust and credibility — in the context of broader compensation design: READ MORE