BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

A Culture Of Customer Service Excellence Starts With Consulting Your Employees

This article is more than 9 years old.

Too many customer service excellence and customer-centricity culture initiatives end up feeling to employees like they've been arbitrarily imposed from on high, by the CEO and her hand-picked consultants.

On the one hand, a commitment to increasing your corporate customer-centricity has to start somewhere. Someone who has power, quite often the CEO, has to decide that this is the direction in which the company is going to move.  As a consultant, I am incredibly grateful to you, Mr./Ms. Person In Power, for making this choice, this decision.

But from there, I need to ask you a favor. When we come in to do a customer service or corporate culture initiative, it makes all the difference if you would start the process by consulting your employees, or letting us consult with your employees for you:  The people in the proverbial trenches.  The people who, quite literally, are the face and voice of your company.

Too many cultural change initiatives are shoved down the throat of, rather than pursued collaboratively with,

1. Employees who would be happier if they had been asked; their buy-in would be so much deeper if this were “their” project or partially their project, not somebody else’s force-fed flavor of the day (with them as the force-feedee). Involving the front lines is so much better than risking an attitude of  "Yeah, yeah, the CEO wants to have this initiative, but for how long? I think we can ride this initiative out like we’ve ridden out Lean, Six Sigma, and so forth."

Good ideas that come from elsewhere are so much more likely to be snubbed than good ideas that we've been part of from the beginning.  I think most of us figured this reality out kindergarten, or if we're very slow learners, we figure it out in high school.

2. Employees who have so much to offer in honing the overall framework and the subtleties of the implementation.  As a consultant, I bring outside perspectives, and do my best to study the inside perspective at your company.  But I will never be the inside perspective.  The inside perspective is owned by your employees.  The specific language, for example, that is unique to your company.  The idiosyncrasies of how each job actually needs to be performed.  Little "inefficient" touches that your customers appreciate that need to be preserved.  And so on.

3. Employees who can see the elephant in the room: an elephant that may be invisible to you, the CEO. (You'll have to trust me that this is a far more likely possibility than you can imagine.)

There are a variety of reasons that you're failing to be customer-centric, and if you, or perhaps we, can spend some time studying this, it can make all the difference.  Some of this study is observation of how your work is done.  But some of it can be straightforward, interviewing of the people who are doing the job for you day in and day out.

For example, in broad strokes, your employees may know (and be willing to share) that:

—We (frontline employees) want to work better with customers, but our managers don’t want us to. They're valuing something else, whether out of inertia or because their bonuses incentivize them to do so.

--or--

—We (the front line and our managers) want to be customer centric, but well-intentioned metrics (KPI's, AHT's, etc.) are getting in the way.

--or--

—We'll never be customer-centric until our hiring practices are fixed.  Yes, we have some people here who are well-suited to work with customers, but we have a lot who were hired on a hunch, hired solely for technical skills, even (don't fool yourself that this doesn't happen) because of how they look.

--or--

—We want to be customer centric, but our toolbox is broken.  We have a great, dedicated team, but everything from our brooms to our database are out of date and poorly maintained. We understand why it was like this when we were a startup, but living a daily crisis of malfunction is taking its toll on employees and, quite directly, on customers as well.  So a customer-centric initiative is something we would support, we will support, but only if it includes what it must include to work: supporting the people (us) who support the customers.

Micah Solomon is a corporate culture consultant, customer experience consultant, customer service speaker and the bestselling author most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service