When the Cat’s Away

You may assume as a manager that all the guidance you give to your employees while you’re on-site, should mean that they’ll make better customer service decisions when you’re away. Unfortunately, the reverse may be true. Sometimes a manager’s feedback to employees ends-up making bad service worse. A supervisor for example, reprimands a teller for being too slow, so she starts being abrupt with customers. A store owner tells an employee that he is not up-selling enough, so he attempts to up-sell all the time - even when there is a long waiting line. Not good. Not for customers, employees, or profits.

The solution is not avoiding correcting employees. It’s instead to augment your feedback with another tool. If you’re not using it yet, consider using prioritized service standards. Here’s how they work.

Faster isn’t always better
Imagine that you are a manager in a multinational oil company in charge of the help-desk call centre. The twenty employees who report to you are responsible for taking calls from co-workers all over the world with computer problems. Your department receives about five thousand calls a month. Your objective as the manager is to improve your employees’ customer service and their morale—on a limited budget. Incidentally, this is an actual case example based on one of my clients who brought me in to assist in training their help-desk employees.

If the manager in these circumstances tries to boost productivity and customer satisfaction by pushing employees to work faster, the results would likely be a mess. You’d have employees who felt like they were being rushed and customers who felt the service was abrupt. Mistakes would happen that would require more time to correct later. Compare this poor outcome to the results of using prioritized service standards.

Setting your standards
Let’s say that as a management team you’ve established these five corporate values: quality, courtesy, efficiency, innovation, and safety. You then take these values, interpret them for your department, and prioritize them. Here’s the ranking we determined when we worked through this with our client:
1. Quality. In the case of a help-desk call centre, the ‘quality’ of the service is measured by the percentage of calls where the customer’s problem is solved over the phone on the first call. It’s why the department exists, so it’s number one.
2. Courtesy. This relates to the customers’ perception of the way they are being treated by call-centre employees.
3. Efficiency. This is where we measure call volume—how many calls the employee handles.
4. Innovation. This relates to ideas that call-centre employees generate to help reduce the overall number of calls.
5. Safety. In the case of a help desk for a call centre where employees are phoning with questions about using a computer, there is little physical danger involved. That’s why it’s listed last in the call-center’s five values.

The shift in decision making
Next step - help desk employees are trained on each of these five standards and their priority. They are also held accountable for upholding these standards. Since quality comes before efficiency, employees know that it’s OK to take more time with a customer to fix the problem right the first time. In terms of courtesy they are equipped Influence with Ease® skills we teach on handling upset customers who are having computer problems. Efficiency is still important, so employees know they can’t spend fifteen minutes on idle chatter with customers. Since innovation is also a standard, employees also know that they need to generate ideas to prevent future problems.

In other words these service standards help to clarify how employees should base their decisions. Without these standards, employees may simply focus on the last thing they were criticized on; regardless of whether it makes sense under the circumstances. The bonus is that other departments in the same company can adapt the same values to create their own customized service standards.

Adapting with Ease
Now move from the call-centre department of this oil company to the company’s retail service stations. Gas stations have the same service standards as the call centre, but gas station employees would interpret the corporate values differently. For service stations you end up with the same standards; but the priority is now: 1.Safety 2. Courtesy 3. Efficiency 4. Quality 5. Innovation
By having prioritized service standards for their department, gas-station employees have a clearer idea of what’s expected of them. Since safety is ranked higher than courtesy, kiosk cashiers know that it’s OK to not turn on the gasoline pumps for a customer who’s smoking near the fuel tank, even though the customer may not like it. Of course, since courtesy is the second priority, employees need to be equipped with communication tools that we provide on how to break bad news without losing the customer.

Bottom line - supervisors can do less leaning over the shoulders of frontline workers. Prioritizing your service standards will make employees less stressed and customers more satisfied. As for managers - who knows – maybe for once even the cat will have a chance to play.


When the Cat’s Away - To learn more about this author, visit Jeff Mowatt's Website.

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