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.

The revolution begins with you

When I started this blog, one of my concerns was that the customer service literature mainly tends to treat those of us who actually provide the service as objects to be manipulated (see "That's a good doggie"). I argue that for any customer service program to succeed, providers must turn that bias on its head. We must exercise leadership, and take personal responsibility for our success. While trying to develop that theme, I recalled this article by Peter Drucker, who died in November 2005, after having devoted 70 of his 95 years to the hope that he could make us better people, as well as better managers.

Excerpts from Managing Oneself
Peter Drucker, in Harvard Business Review

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen  profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive.

To do those things well, you'll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself -- not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

What Are My Strengths?

• A person can perform only from strength.
• We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.
• Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.
• The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
• Several implications for action follow from feedback analysis.
• First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
• Second, work on improving your strengths.
• Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it. Far too many people -- especially people with great expertise in one area -- are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.
• It is equally essential to remedy your bad habits -- the things you do or fail to do that inhibit your effectiveness and performance.
• One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

How Do I Perform?

• Amazingly few people know how they get things done. Indeed, most of us do not even know that different people work and perform differently. Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees nonperformance.
• Like one's strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of personality.
• Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best perform. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs.
• Am I a reader or a listener? What’s the best way for you to get information? The first thing to know is whether you are a reader or a listener. Far too few people even know that there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both. Even fewer know which of the two they themselves are.
• How do I learn? There are people who learn by writing. Some people learn by taking copious notes. Some people learn by doing. Others learn by hearing themselves talk.
• Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if you do work well with people, you then must ask, In what relationship? Some people work best as subordinates. Some people work best as team members. Others work best alone.
• Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser? A great many people perform best as advisers but cannot take the burden and pressure of making the decision. A good many other people, by contrast, need an adviser to force themselves to think; then they can make decisions and act on them with speed, self-confidence, and courage.
• Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?
• Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?.
• Do not try to change yourself -- you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.

What Are My Values?

• To be able to manage yourself, you finally have to ask, What are my values?
• Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person's values must be compatible with the organization's values. They do not need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist. Otherwise, the person will not only be frustrated but also will not produce results.
• A person's strengths and the way that person performs rarely conflict; the two are complementary. But there is sometimes a conflict between a person's values and his or her strengths. What one does well--even very well and successfully -- may not fit with one's value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one's life to.
• Values are and should be the ultimate test.

Where Do I Belong?

• Most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong.
• Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong. The person who has learned that he or she does not perform well in a big organization should have learned to say no to a position in one. The person who has learned that he or she is not a decision maker should have learned to say no to a decision-making assignment.
• Equally important, knowing the answer to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, "Yes, I will do that. But this is the way I should be doing it. This is the way it should be structured. This is the way the relationships should be. These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.”
• Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person -- hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre -- into an outstanding performer.

What Should I Contribute?

• Knowledge workers have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
• It is rarely possible -- or even particularly fruitful -- to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half? The answer must balance several things.
• First, the results should be hard to achieve -- they should require "stretching," to use the current buzzword. But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved -- or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances -- is not being ambitious; it is being foolish.
• Second, the results should be meaningful. They should make a difference.
• Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.
• From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.

Responsibility for Relationships

• Very few people work by themselves and achieve results by themselves. Most people work with others and are effective with other people. Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships. This has two parts.
• The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. This means that they too have their strengths; they too have their ways of getting things done; they too have their values. To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers.
• Bosses are individuals and are entitled to do their work in the way they do it best. It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of "managing" the boss.
• The same holds true for all your coworkers. Each works his or her way, not your way. And each is entitled to work in his or her way. What matters is whether they perform and what their values are. As for how they perform -- each is likely to do it differently. The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values.
• The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication. Most conflicts arise from the fact that people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what contribution the other people are concentrating on and what results they expect. And the reason they do not know is that they have not asked and therefore have not been told.
• Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity. It is a duty.

Conclusion

The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naïve. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves, profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put.

But today the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.

Who won the revolution?

Excerpts from The Service Revolution: Who Won?
Ron Zemke, Management Review

Consumers were promised the end of dull-witted sales help and companies were dazzled by the potential of more loyal customers. But except for a few world-class organizations, the customer-service movement didn't quite deliver all the rewards its proponents had anticipated.

Whatever happened to the customer-service revolution?

• A study by The Conference Board found that 42 percent of consumers rate the companies they deal with as "fair" or "poor" at meeting their needs and only 8 percent as "excellent."
• A study at Car and Truck Dealer magazine found that 14 percent of car buyers switch because of product and 68 percent switch brands because they are disappointed in service and treatment.
• The University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has shown a steady, gradual decline in customer satisfaction since the index's inception.
• Howard Levinson, head of a Boston-based mystery-shopping firm, calls the service revolution the customer-service myth. "As quickly as providers have rushed on the bandwagon of the `service, service, service' craze, many can't hack it.

Is the Revolution Over?

We polled several of the United States' leading customer-service researchers to find out. As Benjamin Schneider, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, put it, "It's not dying, but it is resting--it has certainly plateaued." There are five factors behind this slowdown:

• Rising expectations: At least a part of current consumer disappointment and frustration with service in America comes from the contrast between expectations and experience. "We don't always appreciate the improvements because our standards are rising," says Leonard S. Berry, professor of marketing and director of the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas A&M University.
• Downsizing. Berry points to years of downsizing, reengineering and retrenchment. "Reengineering has had an especially hard effect on service delivery. It is not that downsizing or rightsizing or layoffs in and of themselves are wrong, but the way they have been done has both eroded trust in management and increased work loads on service people in many organizations," he says. "They don't believe the service message and they are tired and overworked. Consequently, they don't work as quickly or carefully, or spend the needed time with customers and their problems." And customers are noticing the absence of attention.
• Commitment. As with every management vogue, there has been a significant amount of superficial fad following and lip service in the service revolution. Mary Jo Bitner, associate professor of marketing at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., says that in many companies there has been a lot of noise, but little commitment and less change. "A number of companies are unwilling to commit to service-improvement results. They try one thing that sounds good; then something else comes along that sounds good [and] then they try that. They haven't committed to a specific, tangible plan for service quality for the long, hard haul."
• Multiattribute Evaluation. Perhaps because it looks so simple when it is done well, many a management team saw a focus on service quality as an easy, cosmetic route to marketplace distinction. But they've been surprised. "There is no more difficult business to manage than a multisite service operation," asserts Michigan's Hart. "Service is very personal. And it is produced by all those mini-factories, staffed with low-paid, part-time workers. If you don't stay on it every minute, the wheels come right off." Berry sees service-quality improvement in a large organization as especially difficult. To improve service in an environment like that is an awesome task. "It is slow, plodding work, and you take one step back for every three steps you take forward."

Harder than we thought

• Bitner suggests that consultants, researchers and managers have all been taken a bit by surprise by the amount of work involved in making a service-quality effort succeed. "Ten years ago we were focused on training and awareness. Make everyone service-conscious and things will work out. Today we know you have to look at systems, processes, reward structures - everything - to make a service effort succeed," she says.
• Schneider agrees: "Early on we thought service quality was pretty simple. Teach people to smile, put someone in the lobby to play the piano, and you were now a service-quality business. Not so. It requires [looking at] the whole system to make it work. The successful companies, especially the ones who were doing great service all along, even before we named it the service-quality thing, made it all look so easy. It isn't easy."
• It is a much harder task, this service-quality improvement job, than most of us dreamed going in. It takes a clear focus on the specific advantage you think you can create, and a commitment of time and resources to the 101 improvement tasks that will be necessary.
• In our research we've seen time and again that managers at all levels must be role models of doing things the right way - from dealing with customers to helping people in other departments succeed. Will Rogers said it best: "People learn more from observation than from conversation." It is certainly true in the service-quality effort. Your people will try no harder, will feel no more commitment to serving customers well, than they see reflected in your behavior, in your attitude, and in your commitment and enthusiasm.

The rewards have not deteriorated

• According to the Strategic Planning Institute of Cambridge, Mass., organizations that focus on the quality of customer care keep customers up to 50% longer, have 20% to 40% lower marketing costs and experience 7% to 17% better net returns.
• Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Co. and W. Earl Sasser of Harvard Business School have demonstrated that organizations which improve customer loyalty by 5% improve profits 25% to 85%. And that customer satisfaction drives customer loyalty.

Customer service training - guidelines

Guidelines for customer service training, adapted from the Emotional Intelligence Consortium’s Technical Report on Training & Development. A summary report is also available from the EIC.

The EIC guidelines, developed by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, are based on an exhaustive review of the research literature in training & development, counseling & psychotherapy, and behavior change. They are divided into the four phases of the development process: preparation, training, transfer & maintenance, and evaluation.

The guidelines are adapted below for specific application in customer service organizations. This is a summary document, with links to more detailed entries in this blog.

Preparation

Assess the organization’s needs. Determine the competencies that are most critical for the effective performance of customer service jobs in the organization.

Assess the individual, based on the key competencies needed for the customer service job.

Deliver assessments with care. Give the individual information on her strengths and weaknesses. Be specific and clear. Provide the feedback in a supportive environment in order to minimize resistance and defensiveness, but also counter excuses, and stress the seriousness of deficiencies.

Maximize learner choice. Where possible, allow people to decide whether or not they will participate in the training. People are more motivated to change when they freely choose to do so. Start with voluntary attendance. This practice will also help you identify promoters and detractors.

Gauge readiness. Assess whether the individual is ready for training. If the person is not ready because of insufficient motivation or other reasons, make readiness the focus of intervention efforts.

Sell the program. Explain how your customer service training is worthwhile and effective. Support from supervisors will motivate participation, provided that the supervisors are credible practitioners of customer service.

Link training to personal values. Help people understand how the customer service training will benefit their personal lives. People are most motivated to pursue change that fits their values and hopes.

Give hope. Let people know that that the social and emotional competences required in customer service can be improved, and that this improvement will lead to valuable outcomes. But ensure that they have a realistic expectation of what the training process will involve.

Training

Foster a positive relationship between the trainers and learners. Trainers who are warm, genuine, and empathic are best able to engage the learners in the change process. Select trainers who have these qualities.

Make change self-directed. Allow people to set their own learning goals, let them continue to be in charge of their learning throughout the program. Learning is more effective when people direct their own learning program, tailoring it to their unique needs and circumstances.

Set clear goals. Spell out the specific behaviors and skills that make up the target competencies. Be clear about what the competence is, how to acquire it, and how to show it on the job.

Break goals into manageable steps. Classify customer service competencies and behaviors by level of difficulty. Dedicate training modules to each level.

Use experiential methods. Develop training activities that engage all the senses, and that are dramatic. Active, concrete, experiential methods tend to work best for learning social and emotional competencies.

Use models. Use live or videotaped models that clearly show how the competency can be used in realistic customer service situations. Encourage learners to study, analyze, and emulate the models.

Enhance self-awareness. Help learners acquire greater understanding about how their thoughts, feelings, and behavior affect themselves and others. Self-awareness is the cornerstone of emotional and social competence.

Transfer & Maintenance

Provide opportunities to practice. Encourage the trainees to try the new behaviors repeatedly over a period of months. Lasting change requires sustained practice on the job and elsewhere in life. An automatic habit is being unlearned and different responses are replacing it.

Encourage use of skills on the job. Reinforce and reward learners for using their customer service skills on the job.

Give performance feedback. Provide focused and sustained feedback as the learners practice new customer service behaviors. Ongoing feedback encourages people and directs change. Ensure that supervisors and peers give periodic feedback on progress. Structure the feedback process.

Build in support. Encourage the formation of groups where people give each other support throughout the change effort.

Prevent relapse. Use relapse prevention, which helps people use lapses and mistakes as lessons to prepare themselves for further efforts.

Lead by example. Change is more likely to endure when supervisors and upper-level management consistently display the competencies themselves.

Develop an organizational culture that supports learning. Change will be more enduring if the organization’s culture and tone support the change and offer a safe atmosphere for experimentation.

Evaluation

Find unobtrusive measures of the competencies before and after training, and at least two months later. One-year follow-ups also are highly desirable. In addition to charting progress on the acquisition of competencies, also assess the impact on important job-related outcomes.

Revolution management

Adapted from Mike Beer and Richard Luecke
Managing Change and Transition, Harvard Business School Press
From Chapter 3 (Seven Steps to Change) and Chapter 4 (Implementation)

A closet radical’s guide to the customer service revolution

Regardless of what position you hold in your organization, you can cause a revolution to take place. These guidelines are meant to help you manage a customer service revolution, and maybe not lose your head.

Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t try to impose a canned solution developed somewhere else.
Don’t place bets on a companywide solution driven from the top.
Don’t put HR in charge.
Don’t bank on a technical fix alone.
Don’t attempt to change everything at once.
Figure: Top 7 implementation problems

The Revolution, in Ten Easy Steps

Step 1. Mobilize Energy and Commitment through Joint Identification of Business Problems and Their Solutions

Have open discussions, involving the front line, to identify business problems caused by inadequate customer service. Share what information you have on falling sales, comps, profits, market share, satisfaction, rebuy behavior, etc. Ask the strategic questions: What will make customers choose us over the competition? What will make us stand out? What do our customers want? How can we give them that and turn a profit? How can we do that better than anyone else?

If the answers to these questions point to outstanding customer service as the key to the solution, you have found the justification for launching the revolution. In doing so, you have also gained the support of the masses, upon whose back the revolution will either triumph or fail.

Step 2. Develop a Shared Vision of How to Organize and Manage for Competitiveness

Develop a clear vision of the future, make the benefits clear. For example: We will be renowned for customer service in (our community, our industry, our country, the world), and be the provider of choice.  People will want to work with us because we are the best, and we will be the employer of choice. When we treat our customers and people well, sales and profits will follow, for the benefit of both the company and the people in it. Describe how you will get there, e.g. through continuing formal and self-directed training, execution of supportive policies and programs (see below).

Step 3. Identify the Leadership, Assemble the Team 

The leaders must champion the program, assemble the needed resources, and be ready to take responsibility for failure. Successful change leaders (a) have a deep conviction that fundamental change will have a major impact on the organization, (b) articulate a credible and compelling vision, (c) have a depth of operating experience, and (d) have the ability to get people on board. The leaders of a customer service initiative must have a track record of excellence in customer service.

Enlist the support and involvement of key people, with the right blend of skills, resources, authority,  influence, and leadership. Involve the business unit leaders. You will only succeed if more than 75% of the managers are on board.

Step 4. Craft the Plan.

Keep it simple, flexible, divided into achievable chunks, and with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Involve those affected. Identify milestones with which to mark progress.

Step 5. Set the Standards, Develop Competencies.

Set standards for customer service behavior, based on the needs and wants of your target customers. Develop the competencies needed to meet these standards.

Step 6. Start Change at the Periphery, Surround the City from the Countryside

Changing an organization all at once is not likely to succeed. The likelihood of success is much higher when the change is effected by small, autonomous units. Prove that the program works, then spread it.

Step 7. Communicate Relentlessly

Communicate frequently to inform, motivate, overcome resistance, address setbacks, and give people a personal stake in the program’s success.

Step 8. Focus on Results, Not on Activities

Process measurements (number of people trained, number of teams created) do not ultimately matter. Use measurements that relate directly to how customer service impacts your sales and profits, such as number of complaints, number of compliments, or your net-promoter score. Set short term goals, as in “We will raise our net-promoter score from 40% to 45% in 90 days".

Step 9. Institutionalize Success through Formal Policies, Systems, and Structures

Use the standards of customer service behavior in hiring, training, and firing. Make it a part of the institutional process to recognize outstanding providers frequently. Align incentives to excellence in customer service. Engage in continuous, self-directed, customer service education. Flatten the bureaucracy, and give people in the front line the power to resolve customer problems.

Step 10. Monitor and Adjust Strategies in Response to Problems in the Change Process 

Anticipate changes in schedules, sequencing, and personnel. Establish mechanisms for immediate feedback on the program, and improve it as you go along.

See also: Why the revolution falters