Customer Service Reader

The employee experience

Notes from Customer Experience Management, Bernd Schmitt

In most companies, employees do not care about their jobs. A Gallup survey found that only 25% of employees are “actively engaged”. 75% are just muddling through. University of Michigan’s David Ulrich observes that “job depression” is on the rise.

• Disengaged and depressed employees are not likely to deliver a great experience to customers.
• To turn that around, you must engage the heart and soul of every employee. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago found that employees want to experience work as “flow” – when they become so involved in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. Flow is about optimal experiences and enjoyment in life, and the ultimate goal is “turning all life into a unified flow experience”. When that happens, work does not feel like work, and the separation of work and leisure becomes meaningless. Work and leisure become one.

You can make that happen by treating employees as customers, and applying the principles of Customer Experience Management.

1. Find out what they want, learn about their experiential world.
2. Ask them what they would change.
3. Instead of imposing a regime, let them help develop their new work environment.
4. Get them really involved in the brand. Run workshops and discuss what it means to them. Let them suggest how they can live the brand in their work and in their personal lives.
5. Examine the employee interface. How can you improve contacts and interactions?
6. Seek their input about innovation, include them in developing innovations.

If you pay attention to your employees experiences, you will be rewarded with a happier, more productive, more proactive workforce. Utopia? Yes, sadly many companies today still operate according to a command-and-control system. Strategy is developed at the top and disseminated to the front lines in an environment of fear. This experience-destroying, military model of the organization fails to recognize the innovative and value-creating forces that a positive employee experience can unleash.

Empowerment prerequisite

Notes from Built to Last, Chapter 6, pages 138-139, Jim Collins, Jerry Porras

Companies seeking an "empowered" or decentralized work environment should first and foremost impose a tight ideology, screen and indoctrinate people into that ideology, eject the viruses, and give those who remain the tremendous sense of responsibility that comes with membership in an elite organization.

It means getting the right people on the stage, putting them in the right frame of mind, and then giving them the freedom to ad lib as they see fit.

It is tightness around an ideology that enables a company to turn people loose to experiment, change, adapt, and - above all - to act.

                                                      . . .

Nordstrom has a one-page employee handbook - a single 5"x8" card. It says: Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1 : Use you good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

While visiting a class at the Stanford Business School, Jim Nordstrom was asked how a Nordstrom clerk would handle a customer attempting to return a dress that had obviously been worn. His reply:

I don't know. That's the honest answer. But I do have a high level of confidence that it would be handled in such a way that the customer would feel well treated and served. Whether that would involve taking the dress back would depend on the specific situation, and we want to give each clerk a lot of latitude in figuring out what to do. We view our people as sales professionals. They don't need rules. They need basic guideposts, but not rules. You can do anything at Nordstrom to get the job done, just so long as you live up to our basic values and standards.

The Golden Mean

Who love too much, hate in the like extreme,
And both the golden mean alike condemn.
- Alexander Pope, in The Odyssey of Homer

Although I am a customer service radical, I do not believe in such platitudes as the “customer is always right”. The customer can be wrong, or worse, insane. So I do not believe that you should always give them what they want. A revolution based on such unrealistic claptrap sows the seeds of its own destruction. You will not be able to stay in business if you give away the store.

Many companies that are renowned for customer service - such as Disney, Nordstrom, and Ritz-Carlton - can afford to do almost anything to appease their customers, even when they’re wrong. That’s because their margins are so high. You cannot afford to be so liberal when you’re competing in a low-margin industry.

And a lot also depends on the cost of the accommodation. It’s easy enough to give away a free day pass, or a free pair of shoes, or a free night’s stay. Not so easy to give a plasma TV away.

Too often I have seen companies swing from one extreme to the other. For example, they’ll start with a liberal “Satisfaction Guaranteed” return policy. They eventually notice that returns are hurting their sales, and that mountains of rejects are piling up on their floors. They panic and swing the other way. No returns past 14 days. 15% restock on open-box product. Eventually they notice that their customers abandoned them for the store next door, and that their employee turnover went through the roof because people just couldn’t take getting screamed at anymore. And back they swing again.

The right thing to do is, of course, somewhere in the middle. If you’re a low-margin business, you must have policies that are competitive – not much better or worse than your competition. Then you must give your people the power and the training to bend the rules. Here’s the principle: The policies are there to protect the company from bad customers. Your people are there to protect good customers from the policies.

Such a balanced approach requires that you hire people with experience and judgment. If you can’t afford to hire such people into front-line positions, you must define specific guidelines within which your people can play. If you think that hiring the right people and training them is just too much trouble and expense, enjoy the swing.

Policy honks

Policy wonks love policy, and with good reason. First sighted around 1387, when it meant civil administration or government, its "chief living sense", as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, is "a course of action adopted and pursued as advantageous or expedient". It is also, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a "guiding principle", as in "Honesty is (generally speaking) the best policy", or "The customer is (almost) always right."

Policy honks also love policy, but their reasons are not so good. They quack "policy! policy!" because it's the easiest thing to do. It's an excuse not to think and act. It saves them from exercising judgment. It's a power tool with which to screw customers, show them who's boss. Or it’s because they’re “just following orders”. Some businesses really do design their policies to make things easy for themselves, not their customers. These same companies distrust their employees, and thus give them no freedom to think.

If you work for such a company, here's a good policy: keep your resume current.

Companies that want to stay in business understand that policies are there to protect them from bad customers. And their people are there to protect good customers from the policies. They give their people the power to do what’s right for both the customer and the business, train them on how to use it, and give them guidelines within which they can safely bend the rules.

With the advent of robotics and radio frequency identification (RFID), it won't be long before stores get rid of people altogether. Until then they may do well to abide by this policy: good companies have good people to exercise good judgment.

Power to the People

Excerpt from CRM Magazine interview with Robert Spector

CRM magazine: The introduction of the book* starts with what managers can do to create a Nordstrom-style service. What do you mean by that?

Spector: After you boil it down to its essence -

• It's all about thinking like the customer.
• It's empowering your front-line people to give great customer service.
• It's giving the people on the front line the freedom to make decisions, and management supports them in those decisions. That's the key.

I mean, let's be honest, customer service is simple stuff. Every one of us is an expert on customer service. We all know how we expect to be treated; we know what's good service and bad service. We don't need somebody who works in customer service to explain it to us. So why is it so hard for companies to give great customer service? They don't think like the customer, they don't put themselves in the shoes of the customer. They're thinking more about their own organization, processes, and rule book the way it's always been done. Most companies want to make life easier for themselves as opposed to the customer.

* The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence

See also: Empowerment prerequisite