Your Customers Do Not Deserve to Be Treated this Way

Those in a position to hire face it every day. Potential employees who in years past wouldn’t receive the time of day from a hiring manager now line up and “expect” a coveted customer-facing position at your company. Do they deserve it? What have they done to make you believe your customer would be better off with him or her assisting in the sale? Should you give him a chance?

We will see later how important this decision will become.

After a tough assessment you send him the offer letter and explain his job duties. The first day of work arrives and he is ushered through your HR Department.

Form after form is completed, the property walk-through done and countless introductions made. He’s promptly moved to his department, but still very much in the honeymoon phase and unaware of his place in the company. Is he ready to go? Of course not, there’s still the training to do.

He’s handed off from HR manager to Department Head to Immediate Supervisor. Somewhere during this process the company mission statement is discussed along with policies and procedures until he settles in and his work space it filled with the personal trinkets and comforts of home. He’s all set to go.

That’s where the problems begin.

3 Reasons Why We Fail Our Customer

1. We spend too much time focusing on what a new employee must do to fit in to the company’s expectations and formulaic mold of success but little time preparing him for the methods of customer service.
2. Senior management lives in silos dependent on their self satisfaction and protectionism.
3. Ownership makes business decisions based on static facts and figures far removed from the effect they have on the customer.

Is this the best we can do?

According to eConsultancy3*:

• Only about a quarter (26%) of companies have a well-developed strategy in place for improving customer experience.
• 41% of respondents state that organizational structure is a significant barrier – in other words operational silos.
• 38% of respondents state that one of the three biggest problems is the complexity of customer experience, given the growing number of touch points (mobile, phone, retail outlets, email, etc.).

Getting back to that applicant and our decision to hire him: We blame his lack of “customer care” on poor social skills and his lax work ethic on laziness. But there is more to it…

How has management set him up for success?

• He wasn’t given a coach or mentor to be available along his journey to becoming a valued member of the team
• He’s indoctrinated on the accolades of the company with little emphasis on how they came to be and the efforts to provide value to the customer
• He “learned” to not question management and that their decisions were “always best”.

Looking for reasons why we fail our customer? Just answer this question next time management gets together: Is this the best we can do?

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Steve DiGioia – View the original post