One of the benchmarks many businesses set and measure is the quality of their customer service. No doubt, it’s an important metric to a business but do the results (positive or negative) really enable game changing business strategies?
In this series, I’ve been challenging business leaders to compete by changing the rules of the game instead of trying to be the best player at the game. Doing so requires breaking free of industry best practices and radically rethinking your business. In this post, I’m asking you to answer how standard customer service measurements enable those game changing strategies?
To change the rules of the game, your business must stand for a great idea, not just a great product. Anyone can sell a great product but it requires truly empowered and insightful employees to convey a great idea. The role of employees in executing such radical innovations often goes underestimated.
Before you consider game-changing strategies, you best get a sense of your team’s ability to execute it…and your ability to measure it.
Rethinking Customer Service Measurement
Many B2C retailers perform mystery shopping campaigns to check the customer service level of their employees. B2B organizations send out surveys asking customers to rate their team’s performance. It is common practice to test employees for their adherence to prescribed standard operating procedures (SOPs); SOPs that are created by industry consultants, whitepapers and executives with umpteen years of experience in the field.
Yet what are the results of gathering these results? They indicate how well your employees are observing to the current game plan. They might indicate which plays or players need to be swapped out or receive additional training in order to best the competition (who by the way are usually playing by the same rules and training their teams in the same fashion). So it’s a tit-for-tat strategy. More “me-too” thinking. And ever so slowly we progress as we try to out-compete rivals.
Focusing on how close to the rules employees’ operate will not unlock their potential. All you’re doing is encouraging an assembly line mentality that dulls their ability to drive innovation.
Employee Storytelling
Why not stop measuring “service” and measure what your employees think? What they believe? Can your employees easily and proficiently articulate to your customers “what is the differentiation in our business”? Do your employees even share a common mindset?
Too many organizations strategize (and thus measure) their customer service campaigns as a defensive plays. Customers complain and service teams are dispatched to turn them into satisfied customers. I’m not suggesting that such plays are not required but there’s an offensive play here as well.
In their exchanges with customers, all employees have the ability to tell your story but are they capable? Beyond the executives, do they even know it? Measuring their ability to tell your story and truly differentiate the customer experience is critical but you must first be willing to empower them to do so.
Many businesses understand the potential that employees have in executing a game-changing strategy. Few truly enable them to do so however and fewer still include them (all of them) in creating the new rules.
Your Challenge, Should You Chose to Accept It
I challenge you to measure how cohesively employees answer the following questions: What do we deliver that no one else in our field delivers? What is our story? What do we promise that no one else promises?
That’s step one. Stop measuring customer service and try measuring your team’s ability to tell your story. If they can’t you would be well advised to consider changing your rules for employee relations before you try to change your relationship strategy with your customers.
Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
