“You can take the brand mentality too far,” Ainsley said. “Customer service is delivered by people, for people, with more people behind the scenes. Specific crockery, certain magazines and iPad chargers are intrusive novelties in comparison to basic, attentive behaviour.”

He said volume pressure could actually bring benefits to the customer, by increasing competition and driving down prices –  this will increase the value a customer gets, which is an essential element of their buying experience.

“As far as volume targets are concerned, the risk is when the financial penalty for missing targets is so great that customers are put into deals they can’t afford or don’t understand. But there is little record of miss-selling in car retailing.

“However, it could be argued that the swing towards CSI management through standards and incentives has produced a sanitised, regulated process that has distorted the customer experience and made it less authentic and human. That undermines value and is not ethical. It could also be why customers often drift away from franchised dealers for vehicle servicing,” Ainsley said.

Ben Waller, senior researcher at the ICDP, said volume bonuses are seen as useful by manufacturers and dealers in achieving targets.

However, high volume bonuses plus high campaign payments and other discount support tend to distort behaviour, creating ‘hockey-stick graph’ demand at the end of month, quarter and year. This is often linked to manufacturer objectives for clearing their own stocks at the end of their financial year, which is driven in part by investor reporting.

High volume and campaign payments can end up overriding the focus in qualitative bonus programmes and can often lock networks into price focus and stock push.

Brands that rely heavily on campaigns and high volume bonuses struggle to move away from this model when demand for products improve.

The better qualitative schemes include some form of CSI and a mix of best practice process bonuses (e.g. use of lead management systems), plus a host of other areas including training bonuses, financial data reporting, planning, and marketing activity, although the best schemes limit the qualitative elements to a core few.

For premium brands, qualitative elements have traditionally attracted much higher bonuses than volume elements.

“In the past, the volume brands paid potential qualitative bonuses that were slightly higher than the quantitative elements, but this was added to by significant campaign payments.”