Your fiscal year is coming to an end. Last year around this time you challenged your workforce to implement several new programs, step up their measurable service rating through increased positive responses in client surveys, and provided three tiers of goals to measure fiscal success.

Your marketplace had been arching, so it was no surprise that you reached all three levels of your goals – however you dwarfed even the highest tier, adding nearly 15% on top of what you thought would be difficult to reach.

The biggest surprise was in the customer service surveys, where you went from a respectable 91% up to a staggering 98.5% satisfaction rating in regards to your frontline service workers. Each of the other managed components for whom a satisfaction rating is compiled, supervisors, sales staff, and IT support stayed nearly identical to the numbers from previous years. However there was a noticeable decrease in satisfaction rating numbers from the product repair department where they dropped from 87% to 79%. The director of the department blamed the drop on a new part that failed consistently, leading to customer frustration, although there was nothing directly in the survey from clients supporting that claim.

You want to recognize everyone in the organization for helping you to exceed goals, and will deal with the possibility of faulty components as a contributor to the low rating for the repairs department. However you want to give special credit to the customer service department at your annual meeting for their increase. How can you best leverage their success to inspire other departments without making the repairs department feel worse for being the only division to see a slide – especially one that may not have been completely their doing?