Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (13 page)

‘‘I was born in Rome. And where are you from?’’

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‘‘I was born in Jamaica.’’

‘‘Jamaica’s such a great island. I’ve been on a vacation there, Montego Bay area. Is that near where you come from?’’

‘‘I was born closer to Kingston.’’

And yappedy, yappedy, yappedy, yap.

If all goes well, the attendant will have established an emotional connection in this conversation. So the next time Leonardo pulls in to the station, what might the attendant do? He might say something like:

‘‘Leonardo, welcome back! I haven’t seen you for a while.

Have you been in Europe?’’

‘‘No, I was just in New York for a few days visiting

friends.’’

‘‘And these friends you were visiting: Are they Italian, too?’’

‘‘Oh no, no, they come from Philadelphia.’’

‘‘Oh, then I’m sorry for them,’’ he could reply, smiling.

A service station seems like a mundane setting, yet this attendant has just provided anticipatory service. He has gone to the trouble to remember the customer’s name, preferences, and life history. Because being attended to is a nearly universal human desire, the attendant’s behavior likely constitutes the anticipation of Leonardo’s unexpressed wishes. In consequence, the customer is likely to begin to have loyal feelings toward this attendant and, more generally, toward the attendant’s employer, DinoFuels. Keep this relationship going, and soon Leonardo
will
bother to make a half-mile U-turn in rush hour traffic in order to shop there.

Once he’s loyal, the customer will also become more forgiving of occasional lapses in service at Dino. This is an important advantage of cultivating loyal customers. When a merely satisfied customer encounters one of your mistakes, positive feelings you’ve built up in that cus-

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tomer reset to zero—at best. In contrast, now that this particular customer feels emotionally attached to DinoFuels, the station’s staff can make some flubs without erasing his built-up feelings of goodwill toward them.

Volume Is No Excuse: Let’s Get the Process Started

The typical excuse for not trying to recall individuals and their preferences or idiosyncrasies is ‘‘volume’’: ‘ We serve too many customers to set up a process that requires us to remember them individually.’’ This is a questionable excuse, but we hear it regularly even from businesses with a more limited customer base (and far greater upside per customer) than a gas station, such as law firms. It’s true that the on-the-fly remembering and acknowledgement of minor customer details in a situation like this is dependent on individual employees. So a reasonable question is: How many individual customers, for example, can
you
‘‘remem-ber’’? We’re confident that the answer is in the hundreds. It’s not that you have to remember every single detail of their lives—just a few minor points. (Of course, for more complex use of customer details and preferences, we advocate computer-aided memory systems, as discussed in Chapter 5.)

Let’s assume you are indeed hard at work in a gas station, with twelve busy pumps. You have about ten customers per pump per hour. That is 120 brief transactions an hour, about 960

customers per eight-hour shift. Many customers pay at the pump, which leaves you probably interacting with a few hundred people a day. Perhaps 25 percent of these are the habitual customers our proposed process suggests you interact with: probably fifty people a day, in this very busy business. And, of course in almost any business, the demand will be even less than this.

But you need to get the process started.

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The balance of the transition from habitual to loyal depends on people skills: on employees who are hired, trained, and inspired to excel at anticipatory service. (To give just one example, the attendant would need the finesse to know not to engage Leonardo this actively if Leonardo had shown signs of restlessness or wanting to be left alone.) Finding, training, and inspiring such people is a central issue, with rewarding solutions, and we’re about to get into it elbow-deep.

Take a breath. We’re ready when you are.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Your People

Selection, Orientation, Training, and Reinforcement

The art of anticipation requires, at its core, the right people. People who have been chosen correctly for their positions, who understand their purpose in your organization, who are inspired by leadership, trained in the necessary technical skills, and given reinforcement daily.

Let’s take a closer look.

We Are Already Our True Selves: Select for Traits

How can you fill the ranks of your company with people who will be superb at anticipating the needs of your customers? To begin with, you need to move away from hiring in most positions for specific
skills
and toward selecting for
talent
. Give that friendly, insightful, responsible applicant who has a knack for making people feel comfortable a shot—even if it means passing over an applicant with a reśume´ that more closely matches the job’s day-to-day functions.

Why? Although we all want to believe that our personality traits and aptitudes can shift at any time throughout our lives, such change rarely happens in adulthood. Decades of research have consistently shown that most of us persist throughout adult life with more or less 84

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the same personalities and aptitudes with which we began it. So if Jane has always tended to become quarrelsome under stress, she’ll probably have that tendency throughout the decades ahead of her. If Jack is now a superbly patient and supportive listener, he’s very likely going to stay that way until his dotage.

Can we be certain that any particular employee will conform to this rule? Absolutely not. But successful businesses are built on a series of well-calculated bets, not guarantees. And your likeliest bet is that your employees have already settled into the personalities and aptitudes that they’ll have in the future. Remember this whenever you are selecting representatives of your brand, and you’ll come out ahead. Recognize this, and you’ll understand why we recommend using the best personality and aptitude assessment tools available to you—appropriate testing, appropriate evaluation—to find people with the talents you’re looking for.

Isn’t it important to hire the applicant with the best job-specific experience? Quite often, the answer is no. Job functions can be taught, but it’s nearly impossible to teach empathy, energy, or cognitive flexi-bility. So go ahead and set up your hiring process around lifelong traits such as a sincere and pleasant way of interacting with other people, a good command of language, a sense of responsibility and commitment, and so forth. Generate your own list of the traits that are crucial to your business.

Here are the top five traits we have found to be the most important for the people we select to join us in our enterprises. We find these five traits useful in selecting candidates for a service position from a hospital to a bank, from a tech support counter to a call center that serves an online florist.

1. Genuine personal warmth.
Ask men and women what they want in a spouse, and they’ll tell you slightly different things. But interestingly, in survey after survey, men and women from various cultures agree on the single most important characteristic:
warmth.
Genuine warmth (or, as it is sometimes called,
kindness
) in a mate is valued more than any-

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thing else. It even trumps physical attractiveness, compatibility of interests, or success. From infancy onward, warmth serves to reassure us that somebody won’t double-deal us, turn on us, or abandon us in our moment of need.

People are hard-wired to pick up on warmth, or its absence, very quickly. They’re also excellent at detecting phony warmth
simulations
.

That’s one reason why it’s foolish to hire cold or stand-offish representatives in the hope of training them to
act
warmly with customers. Customers, like people everywhere, are superb at detecting counterfeit warmth.

2. Empathic skill.
Warmth and empathic skill are interrelated, but it’s helpful to know the difference between them and to make sure that both are represented in your employees. One way to think about the difference: Warmth involves a tendency to express sincerely positive feelings toward people. Empathic skill is the ability to understand what another human being is going through and how to interact helpfully in that situation.

An example: Joan is a company employee with abundant warmth but low empathic skill. Because of her warmth, we know she will
want
to say exactly the right thing when a long-term client blurts out that he just lost his job. But without strong empathic skill, she won’t know which kinds of reactions are likely to be helpful, which are likely just to be awkward, and which are likely to actually cause the poor fellow more pain.

Now Kevin, who works in the same company as Joan, has high warmth
and
high empathic skill. He cares about his clients, but he also knows when to avoid a personal topic, when to offer an opinion, and when to just ask gentle questions. Kevin almost certainly would have been able to help the same client feel understood, supported, and gently encouraged.

3. An optimistic, upbeat attitude.
Service can be draining. This is true when you’re learning the ropes, and it’s still true when you’ve been in the business a long time. Setbacks are common, reversals of fortune Your People

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occur—and if you are inclined to a pessimistic view of things, you won’t be able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman has studied the importance of positive attitude in business. Seligman’s research shows that in many positions, including those he calls ‘‘high burnout jobs,’’ the single most important difference between success and failure is not intelligence, luck, or experience. It is whether employees have an ‘‘optimistic explanatory style’’
1
or a pessimistic one. That’s because a pessimistic attitude
(‘‘That customer doesn’t
really want to hear from me’’)
tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy
(‘‘I can’t call on that customer out of the blue now—we haven’t spoken in
months, and she’s probably taken her business to another company.’’)
How employees understand causation helps determine performance in service positions. Consider Kevin, the employee with considerable warmth and empathetic skill. If Kevin is also an optimist, he will avoid feeling demoralized by a customer who takes out frustrations on him—and therefore he’ll find it easier to snap back and regroup later in the workday. When an order goes awry for a customer, a more pessimistic service professional may become paralyzed by fear—not only for his client’s well-being, but for his own.

(However, it is important to have some of the potentially adaptive aspects of pessimism represented within your company ranks as well.

Pessimism can positively lead to: thinking things through to avoid errors, inhibiting impulsive or brash actions, and not being easily satisfied that ‘‘everything is great now.’’ Excessive optimism can be downright dangerous in certain positions in any organization: from financial forecaster to safety officer to professional driver. There is no one profile that is going to fit every position within an organization.)

4. A team orientation.
It’s easy now to imagine our Kevin interacting warmly, insightfully, and optimistically with a discouraged client. But suppose that Kevin is poor at keeping others on his team informed about how the client is doing, rejecting any offers of support in meeting her service needs
(‘‘You know I can handle it all myself ’’)
. Kevin’s work style is likely to cause trouble on any tightly interrelated team. If Kevin lacks the teamwork trait, he will wreak havoc on his teammates.

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5. Conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness is a broad trait that subsumes concepts like responsibility, work ethic, diligence, and attention to getting the details right. The conscientious employee takes pride in doing things well, pays close attention to his work, stays organized, and follows through. All the warmth, empathy, optimism, and team spirit in the world won’t suffice if you lack conscientiousness. A client of a representative like that will say things like this:
‘‘Yes, Kevin has been wonderfully encouraging. He really seems to understand my priorities, and he has helped
me connect with some terrific resources. But I’ve had a lot of trouble reaching
him, he tends not to reply to my emails for days, he forgets to do even the most
basic things, and, to cap it all off, he called today to say he’s lost my file! I’m
sorry, I’ve had it.’’

Whatever combination of trait criteria you settle on, you’ll need to vigorously defend and promote its use, especially when your company is growing quickly. Others will pressure you at such times to fill positions regardless, without slowing down. Resist.

Keep the Hiring Bar High

Resist the temptation to fill a vacant position with an inferior employee.

In the strange-but-true department, in most cases it is better to have a team of superb employees suffer temporary overload than to insert ill-suited employees into the team. This is a very hard principle for service-oriented people to accept, since we want, for example, the phones answered quickly. Yes, that
is
important! But a single bad recruit can poison the mood of an otherwise effective team. The more significant the position, the greater the dose of poison you administer.

Over and over, we’ve watched an entire team’s performance sink when a single wrong employee is hired. To understand why, imagine a group of runners that gets together every Sunday evening. The members of our group have varied paces. Marty is fast, with a six-minute, thirty-second pace. Wanda runs a seven-minute, thirty-second pace—very quick. Leonardo runs at eight minutes, thirty seconds, and Ezra runs a nine-minute pace. What is the speed of our group? It’s the speed Your People