Be Different or be dead

June 28, 2012

Why ‘human being lovers’ are needed for amazing customer service

Source: Unsplash

Why ‘human being lovers’ are needed for amazing customer service.

Organizations that have a business plan and mission to delight their customers need to recruit people who like to deal with other people.

How can any organization provide amazing service if their people don’t like homo sapiens?

The most critical step if you want to amaze your customers is to hire people with the innate desire and ability to serve and please others

Why is it that we run into service people who obviously hate their job and would rather be taking inventory or working with technology rather than real people?

Why is it that frontline positions are filled with people who have a lot of seniority in an organization but basically don’t like working with other people?
Ever been in a restaurant and have been afraid that the server would either throw something at you or subject your underdone steak to the germ population residing on the floor of the kitchen?

First of all, there is no more important position in any organization that one that deals directly with the public.

These people should be called, as Tom Peters once called them, ‘Supreme Commanders’. They literally control all aspects of an organization that involve its brand: honesty, integrity, caring attitude, responsiveness and overall service quality.

In any call center operations, reps handle thousands of ‘moments of truth’ every single day! Do you think they could influence customer perception toward the company and subsequent decisions to buy a product or service?. No question.

Second, why would the leadership of the organization put anyone into such an important job if they didn’t have the requisite skills and attitude to serve other people? Beats me but they do.

I believe this dysfunctional behavior is due to the fact that they look at these positions as entry level junior jobs rather than a career destination responsible for influencing customer loyalty and long term profitability.

These actions can be taken to make sure you get people obsessed with serving people in frontline positions.

Recruitment — Ensure the recruitment guide asks the right questions to expose this virtue. I find that there are many of what I would call hygiene questions asked, but rarely do I find that the ‘love’ questions are absent to any significant degree.

The right question — Come right out and ask the candidate ‘Do you love people?’ and then ask them to describe 3 situations that proved it. You can tell quickly if the person is suitable to turn loose on your most valuable assets (customers) or not.

The ‘lover’ will tell you a story that makes you tingle; the rest will tell stories that leave you cold. Hire the ‘tinglers’.

Leadership present and accounted for — Have a senior person (an executive leader is the best choice) in the organization to participate in the panel interview process — I did this all the time.

This achieves three purposes:
— it shows people in the organization that hiring frontliners is a critically important matter;
— the candidate understands how serious the organization is about getting ‘people lovers’ in these positions;
— it enhances the richness of the interview itself in terms of the questions senior people bring to the table.

Training — Can you train people to like people?
My experience is a resounding NO! You either have an innate proclivity to like humans or you don’t; no amount of training will change that.
Training might influence how you behave — talk with a smile in your voice for example — and as long as the customer interaction is scripted you might get away with it.

The reality is, however that customers can’t always be scripted and sooner or later the trained frontliner will have to rely on their natural abilities to handle a challenging customer in an elegant and memorable way.

Where do human lovers hang out?

You should always have a frontline recruitment program underway to ensure that you are gathering the best people lovers you can to fuel the funnel created by employee turnover.

Tag ‘em early by going to schools at all levels and spotting the chosen ones.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.28.12 at 07:08 am by Roy Osing
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