Be Different or be dead

March 5, 2018

How a smart frontline can make your business successful

Source: Unsplash

How a smart frontline can make your business successful.

Every organization is looking for the ingredient that will give them a competitive advantage; make them stand out among their competitors.

In my experience most organizations turn to what the prevailing strategy development theory says which often promulgates these types of ways to outpace ‘the bad guys’:

- introduce a disruptive technology
- achieve cost leadership
- lead in product or service quality
- differentiate products or services
- form an alliance with another company
- leadership in new product development
- expand markets
- offer low prices
- achieve economies of scale and scope
- focus on a product or market sector

These are all valid ways of looking at competitive advantage, but beating the competition in the long term isn’t about the brilliance of a strategy, and it’s not about whether or not a strategic plan conforms to strategic planning methodology as espoused by the experts.

Competitive advantage is derived largely from not from what you aspire to achieve, but how you actually achieve it in the real world where organizations are challenged by unpredictability, uncertainty and constantly changing conditions.
If, for example, your strategic intent is to outdo the competition by providing excellent service quality, your success will be determined by how you execute on this goal.

Actions such as providing customer-friendly rules and policies, recruiting people who have an innate desire to serve others, empowering employees to make decisions in favour of a customer and compensating teams on the level of customer service provided will enable the service quality goal to be achieved.

And notwithstanding the rise of the online world, the common element to achieving most of these actions is people.
Successful strategies typically get executed on the frontline at ‘the coal face’ between the customer and the organization — the territory normally occupied by employees in sales, banking, coffee bistros, call centers, repair service centers, retail outlets and on reception desks.

These are the people who control every moment of the customer experience.

How well do you think we would have survived the COVID-19 pandemic without frontline people in all types of roles: food preparation, hospital workers of all types, care givers, nurses, first responders, food delivery folks, and product pickers fulfilling online orders to mention just a few?

Blood flows in any organization for one reason and one reason only: the frontline.

Frontline people live your brand. They invest their emotional energy to keep customers loyal.

It’s one thing to send prospective customers to your website to learn about new products and buy them; but it’s quite another to make the engagement process so enjoyable and painless that the new product flows off the shelf and continues to provide value to the customer over the life of their purchase.

The frontline fills a critical void — Organizations are morphing to an operations topology devoid of humans.
Online research, purchase, chat and warranty claim tasks are more and more being performed by the customer themselves. And new self checkout technologies are being tested to further remove people from the cost equation and provide consumers more speed and convenience of DIY.

But even in the face of a migration to DIY, successful organizations keep a strong people element in their sales and service operations to simply be there to help a customer when they don’t get satisfaction from a technology face.

Let’s face it, precise and accurate algorithms for every customer need can’t be formulated so if a backup person isn’t there to deal with hiccups and follow up questions, the customer is not only upset, they leave telling their friends and family how crummy your service is.

The focus and attention always seems to be on the brilliance and cleverness of the grand plan and the importance of execution is given second shrift and is taken for granted.

In fact most organizations assume that the people will naturally understand what needs to be done (rarely happens without the leader’s translation of what it means to various functions) and employees will willingly devote themselves to executing it effectively (never happens without leadership convincing them of its importance and supporting them to get it done).

Keep the frontline well informed — The frontline of any organization is the key to a successful strategy and yet they are often not equipped with the information they need to handle customer questions like: ‘Why don’t you add this type of draft beer?’ or ‘Why did you take spaghetti and meat balls off the menu?’ Or ‘Why do I have to wait so long to get a customer service representative on the phone?’

Leadership, for whatever reason, generally chooses not to share the details on matters such as product line selection, pricing rationale, credit rules and customer service policies with customer contact employees.

My experience is that the frontline is rarely viewed as a critical element of strategy and that is shortsightedness on the part of leadership.

They think either that the frontline doesn’t need to know the details or that they can figure it out themselves.

I once asked a teller at a credit union why I should do business with them and not a bank. She was startled with my question and said “Because we share our profits with our members, and banks don’t” — not a compelling answer.

The truth is it wasn’t her fault; she wasn’t given the appropriate answer by the leadership who should be supporting her efforts. And so she was left to improvise and invent the answer herself.
Leaders need to be more actively engaged in promoting the importance of frontline employees, and keeping them informed should be a priority; here are four actions to make it happen.

When frontline people don’t have the information to answer a customer‘s question, they feel like idiots.

Promote the frontline’s importance — Elevate frontline employees to the top of the need-to-know funnel. Effective customer engagement creates loyal customers and long term profitability so why would you not want to equip frontline employees with every tool they need to deliver incredible moments?
And communicate what you are doing throughout the organization so everyone knows the cultural change being made.
Beats me why they seem to take the back seat to other groups when it comes to getting the information they need to talk to customers.

Determine their information needs — Ask frontline people (strike a frontline panel to help) what the top 10 questions customers ask them for which they have no answers.
And take their questions verbatim. Don’t allow their bosses to translate them into what they really mean, because all this does is distort the frontlines’ own words.
Feed the questions back to the panel and ask for sign off before providing answers.

Modify the management performance evaluation plan — Rate managers’ performance in part on how effective they are at providing the frontline with the information they need. Ask the frontline to rate managers; they will provide honest input.

As president of the data and internet company, I implemented an internal report card process that had customer service reps rate my management team on their ability to equip them with the info they needed to serve their customers.

The first report card rated managers poorly; improvements in subsequent rounds were seen as action plans were implemented to address the shortfalls.

Engage the frontline in systems design — Who better to determine what information systems look like than the people who use them? Unfortunately this is rarely done.
Yes, we stipulate that systems designers determine the requirements of all stakeholder groups, but the frontline teams are not given top priority.

Frontline supervisors are asked along with managers in finance, inventory control, marketing and business development but frontline employees — those actually engaging with customers — generally aren’t given the chance to input directly to what the system should look like.

To deal with this issue, I created cross functional teams of frontline people who had the final say on how information systems that affected the customer contact process should be designed. And they were given top priority stakeholder status; others came after the needs of customer engagement were recognized.

This action did two things: first, it demonstrated to the rest of the organization that frontline needs were the top priority to support our customer experience strategic game plan and second, it showed frontline people themselves that their needs were paramount.

Frontline people are key to delivering an organization’s strategy, but leaders have a responsibility to ensure that well informed frontline employees is essential.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 3.5.18 at 03:07 am by Roy Osing
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