Incredibly
effective centers can only be run with the experiences of your
best representatives as the anvil for your forge.
Those white hot flashes of insight that
rock you awake in the middle of the night and send you rushing
to your email may be brilliant; they may be cubic zirconium.
Before hitting the "send" button on the marching orders take a
walk on your front line. There should be a process established
to test and refine those brilliant intuitions against the
collective wisdom of your best representatives' day-to-day
experience with the customers.
In Myers-Briggs terms, leaders tend to
rely on "intuition" while front line employees often prefer
"sensing" real data. The best solutions often come from mixing
and matching these two perspectives to ensure that both vision
and practicality have a turn on the dance floor. Good ideas
become great ideas by hammering them out with the experts who
are living on the front lines every day.
To provide an extraordinary customer
experience your front line employees must be fully engaged. You
can achieve your throughput goals by crushing people, but you
cannot exceed your client's expectations with automatons.
Customers have been trained by a multitude of bad telemarketing
campaigns to turn their "crapology" filters on at the start of
every telephone interaction. As soon as customers hear that
monotonic "its-just-a-job" monotone they tune out themselves;
just hoping the Novocain lasts until the extraction is complete.
This, obviously, does not mean that
decisions are turned over to your employees, or that they have a
veto. What it does mean is that leaders should become
increasingly open to additional feedback, deeper analysis and
more scrutiny of a change as the volume and severity of the
criticism rises. At a minimum these objections signal that the
change has either been poorly communicated or the implications
of the change are, in fact, troubling. In either case, these are
valuable flags, suggesting more investment in the change
management process is required.
During the implementation of a very
significant change to the risk models in a credit card center
the representatives started raising flags and button-holing
their supervisors. Some employees flat out refused to accept the
new scores and issued credit based on their experience; way
outside of policy. The initial reaction from the leadership was
that the credit representatives were simply fearful of losing
their jobs as the new models were, theoretically, much more
powerful risk discriminators capable of processing many more
transactions per hour. That fear was present, but what emerged
after deeper investigation was that the models had a serious
flaw, which only appeared for the very best customers asking for
the absolutely highest line increases. Without the collective
wisdom of the credit staff, and the willingness of the
leadership to take one step back, the impact would have only
been felt months later as the cancelled cards came raining down.
Here's the really difficult twist to the
dive; both good ideas and bad ideas may receive equal amount of
negative feedback. But, hey, that's why they pay you the big
bucks, right? The only clear mistake is not seeking the feedback
in the first place out of a mistaken desire to avoid conflict or
a fear of "opening" the issue. Whether you hear about it or not
the conflict is rampaging up and down the halls and break rooms
anyway.
Unless representatives from the front
line are engaged in change management efforts the center loses
its collective will and the leaders lose the benefit of its
collective wisdom. "Will" is at the heart of that vibrant
tonality you hear in a world-class center. By engaging the font
line employees in change management efforts, in employee survey
initiatives, in technology prototypes, and a wide range of
proposed improvements you retain their inclination to choose,
and thrive, rather than simply keeping the Naugahyde warm.
The difference this makes for the
customers is extraordinary. When there's trouble in River City
the best representatives figure it out, the robots hit the
transfer button. Truly extraordinary customer experiences are
almost always rooted in something insipid, ugly, and intractable
that is right on the fine gray line between policy and
rationality. You need your front line representatives to be able
to think their way through these situations, do what is fair for
the customers, but not give away the store. Bad service is the
disease, collective wisdom is the cure.
Copyright © 2007, Lotus Pond Media
Steven Grant is a former customer service executive from
American Express with over 25 years devoted in Fortune 500
companies analyzing, improving and delivering on enhanced
customer experiences. Share your experiences and suggestions on
improving the customer experience at
http://www.customerresearchcenter.com or email Mr. Grant at
scgrant@customerresearchcenter.com
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