OD Cautionary Lessons

There are times when teachable moments happen in a spontaneous way. You're not looking for them but they sort of leap in front of you as though challenging you to see whether you'll speak up or let them continue to fester. There are many risks when these situations arise.

• The company brand suffers
  
• Customers become annoyed and abandon the store or even the entire company
  
• Customers take their business to the competition
  
• Lack of training becomes obvious, causing further deterioration in credibility
  
• Your business looks ridiculous
  

In an effort to avert these and other consequences of poor development initiatives and poor hiring strategies, here are a few cautionary lessons.

Cautionary lesson 1: Assign personnel to areas where they are most effective and then train them to learn and take on gradually increasing duties.

Cautionary lesson 2: Make certain a customer is treated with respect at every phase of contact. If they do not receive immediate attention because of high traffic, let them know that they are part of a queue and will be attended within the next [insert reasonable number] minutes.

Cautionary lesson 3: Don't put the customer through a chain of referrals that exceeds 2 unless it is absolutely mandatory. If the referrals are necessary, provide some reasonable explanation.

Cautionary lesson 4: Don't allow the wait time between referrals to amount to more than 2 minutes if at all possible. If the wait is longer, provide a reasonable expectation of when service will be provided.

Cautionary lesson 5: The customer will not be impressed when attending to their needs is put off by allowing the associate tell the customer they cannot be served because the associate is too busy doing something else that's more important. Don't be surprised if the customer responds that they have something else to do as well.

Cautionary lesson 6: When the employee is falling down on customer service, back office reprimands don't help rebuild brand. Asking the employee in the presence of the customer if the employee has knowledge about the service that was supposed to be delivered helps in the understanding on both sides of the equation. Immediately begin serving the customer while the employee watches and learns.

Cautionary lesson 7: Sometimes the customer who's being put on hold and referred around the store to all the personnel until they're back to the original is actually some type of expert who could be a consultant for your office. Refer to Cautionary lesson 2. Consider the image of the company that begins to form in the customer's mind as these types of scenarios evolve.

Chaos is one way to describe it. Is that what was intended?

Sponsored Links:

• Serves You Right: You Are Responsible For Customer Service
  
• The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service
  

Elements of Employee Engagement

A new concept in HR lingo is "employee engagement." At Entrances (360 employment networking group on LinkedIn), we're considering what goes into considering how much and what constitutes being "engaged."

The first thing that comes to mind about this term is what it means. That's an essential first step so that everyone is talking about the same thing and so more meaning can be added to the conversation and the discoveries that arise from it.

No, I don't think the employee is getting married to anyone in the company or even to the company. (Although an argument could be made that once you've applied for the job and started the interview process, you're essentially "engaged to" the company. But I digress.) So back to defining the concept. William Kahn is the one we can blame for this and the date is 1990.

It isn't about making employees happy, according to Kevin Kruse. It's more about the buy-in that employees have to the vision and mission of the company. It's about their investment in making the company a place that provides value and encourages not only return business but also business growth.

Proof of that concept proved to be a very happy surprise was the day I had a conversation with a Starbucks Customer Service representative. The call started because of a small matter - their generic reusable cups and what to do in order to have one recognized as a legitimate purchase, not a previously used cup during the normal stream of commerce and simply found in a trash bin. In addition to becoming incensed when he grasped the breadth of the disservice, he started talking about why it's important to provide the customer with a great Starbucks experience. He went to great lengths to describe why the customer should feel they are welcome to be there and want to return because of the memory of their experiences with the personnel, the store, the quality of the goods.

The Starbucks representative didn't go into discussing the elements of engagement. However it's important to note that this employment dynamic has components that can be measured. It's also important to know which are the more important components so that the correct measurements, benchmarks, can be gained to measure how well the organization is doing.

How far into doing your job does the examination of employee engagement go? For that matter, does the standard of engagement change depending on the type of employee you are? A temporary employee slaves away the entire time they're at the job (except for the 10-minute break and 30-minute lunch period) whereas the regular employee can count "thinking time" as work. Is organizing your desk or work area or making your "to-do" list for the day (or week) considered being engaged? To what extent do those activities make your customer feel they're getting your full attention and the best you have to offer? Perhaps you should question whether even you become engaged?

So that's what we've come up with so far. Why not join us and keep this, and the other conversations, going.

Sponsored Links:

• Employee Engagement 2.0: How to Motivate Your Team for High Performance (A Real-World Guide for Busy Managers)
  
• Employee Engagement (HR Fundamentals)