Are
You Failing to Engage?
Most
companies face barriers that prevent them from fully engaging
customers and employees. Here are the key characteristics
of those barriers.
After
a long, hard journey, a traveler finally arrives at his
hotel. It's late, and he's exhausted. When he gets to
the front desk, he discovers that the hotel is overbooked.
He no longer has a room. The clerk behind the desk shrugs
and tells him, "There's nothing I can do."
This
is a true story. It may sound painfully familiar to anyone
who has experienced maddening frustration with an employee
who is supposed to be delivering customer service.
Here
are two more stories -- also true. They are different
scenarios, but, as we will discuss, the root of the problem
is essentially the same:
•
An escrow agent calls a mortgage service center with a
serious problem. They have a closing that afternoon, she
says, and have not yet received the closing statement,
though it had been requested several days before. The
service representative says that the agent's request is
in the queue but isn't ready, and he has no idea when
it will be done. The agent requests a verbal payoff but
is told that the company does not provide them. She asks
to speak with a supervisor and is refused. The call ends
with the agent, clearly upset, hoping that none of her
customers ever use that mortgage company again.
•
In a call center, a customer service representative (CSR)
needs to transfer a customer to another department. Because
it's a holiday, that department is closed. The CSR, knowing
that the department is closed, asks the customer to call
the next day and gives him the direct number. The CSR
was penalized on her quality evaluation for not "trying
to transfer the call" even though she knew no one
would answer.
What do these stories have in common? In each case, the
employee had little leeway to make things right for the
customer. Because of the circumstances, rules, policies,
practices, and structure of their organizations, these
workers were either compelled to do the wrong thing, or,
in the case of the CSR, punished for doing the right thing.
Those rules and policies may have been put in place with
the best of intentions, but the results were damaging
to the customers who were forced to endure negative experiences
and to the employees who were forced to inflict them.
The results were also bad for business because they destroyed
a significant amount of the emotional connection between
the company and its customers and employees. And those
connections -- what Gallup calls employee and customer
engagement -- are vital for business because they're what
drive organic growth.
Barriers to engagement, such as the arbitrary rules in
the previous scenarios, do more than turn customers away.
They can force workers to "work around" the
system to provide good customer service or frustrate employees
and drive them away. Worst of all, in almost every case,
these barriers are both unnecessary and self-imposed.
Ultimately, despite other substantial efforts companies
may be making to build engagement, barriers like these
prevent them from engaging their customers and employees.
This two-part series explores the nature of those barriers
-- and shows how companies can overcome them.
Please
click here
to continue reading Are You Failing to Engage?
Reprinted from The Gallup Management Journal |
Note
from Kevin
 Greetings!
Just another
day in paradise!
What
a glorious life traveling North America staying in nice
hotels and visiting wonderful cities and town. Just imagine
the sights! Okay, it’s time to wake up from that
dream! It’s now official: the last 12 months of
air travel have been the worst I’ve experienced
in years. Today is just another example of delays and
cancellations; in fact, it’s the second time in
30 days I’ve had to purchase a ticket on another
airline just to get home.
But…that’s
not the message of the LeadersWay March newsletter. The
real message comes with a Northwest Airlines (did I say
that?) response to an engine failure on one of their pre
WWI 757 planes. Things out of their control happen - and
I get that as much as the next guy - but how you handle
what happens is in your control. NW did not do well.
•
Can you find another flight to get me home?..."NO"
• Can you put me on another airline?..."NO"
• If I do make it to Detroit will you pay for my
room?..."NO"
Oh, did I mention
I am one of their Platinum Elite Plus fliers? Here’s
the irony: in less than 2 minutes on the phone with a
friendly and courteous Southwest Airlines customer service
representative, I was making my way back east.
What’s
different? Why did I experience so much rigidity with
the customer service people at Northwest? Why did it feel
like there was something much bigger behind them pulling
the strings? I encourage you to read on because the article,
"Are You Failing to Engage," helps us see that
it’s often not the customer service person that’s
the problem. The problem is often the old, ineffective
rules and regulations they are forced to follow that breaks
the most important connection between employee and customer.
Remember,
your bottom line is driven by that very point of contact.
The experience your clients and customers have with your
front line people is the difference between profits or
not. Make sure they have the freedom to keep your customers
coming back again and again.
Life
is good...
KW |
