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Customer Centricity Or Employee Centricity: You Don't Get To Pick Just One

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Without customers–customers who are catered to, empathized with, anticipated in their every wish, recognized, acknowledged, served­–employees are going to be out of a job.

And without employees–employees who are supported by leadership, empowered to make decisions, and provided with great working conditions; who have opportunities to grow in the job and a full and up to date toolbox with which to do their work–your organization won’t ever be able to provide customers with the level of service that will bring them back.

Customer centricity or employee centricity: You don’t get to pick just one.

But this is where it gets tricky:  Being a pro-employee, pro-customer company doesn’t mean that you should be tolerant of slacker service from your employees. Being good to your employees doesn’t mean allowing them to punch in habitually late.  It doesn’t mean mean allowing them to shoot the breeze with their colleagues while customers stand by waiting to be served.  On the contrary: Customers deserve the most phenomenal, focused, always-on, well-trained performance from each and every one of your employees.  Service work shouldn’t be easy; it isn’t work for slackers.

Likewise, I don’t mean that there shouldn’t be a difference between how you interact with employees and how they interact with customers. Let me explain what I mean by this because it can be misinterpreted.

On the one hand, the greatest service organizations in the world do strive to treat employees as well as they treat customers.  This is the crux of Ritz-Carlton’s “We are ladies and gentlemen treating Ladies and Gentlemen,” for example (and it is quite an example).

On the other hand, great service organizations also maintain a conceptual divide between “onstage” and “offstage.” Interactions that take place between employees represent a generally-offstage situation; interactions between an employee and a customer are inherently onstage. Onstage with a customer, your language and bearing are going to generally be more formal; for example, you’ll answer the phone differently on an internal extension (“hi, this is Micah”) than on an incoming customer line (where “Good Morning, this is Micah, how may I assist you?” is more appropriate).

And even though styles of service are becoming less formal, more “peer to peer” and “eye level” (see my article on this here), it never means that the employee-customer relationship is the same as the employee-employee relationship. The relationships are inherently different; the customer is, in effect, a guest in your house.  But great service to these guests is dependent on your employees, and how well treated, inspired, motivated, empowered, and developed they are. Don’t let yourself forget it.

Micah Solomon is is a customer service consultant and a customer service speaker, trainer, and bestselling author.

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