My wonderful colleague #vickyhampson has been writing about customer focus and talking about her experiences of customer service. That prompted me to think about what it is that motivates us to deliver good or bad customer service?  If you are an employer, how do you find and retain people who will represent the company at its best?

There’s the obvious answer that you need to find people who like people, who can empathise with the problems of others, who are prepared to spend time understanding those problems and fixing them. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  A combination of the reputation of the company, the training and development of customer facing staff and the realisation by senior management that customer focus, or lack of it can make or break an organisation, are all critical to business survival today.

The people who are the first interface for your customers must feel that they work for an organisation they are proud of.  A company that has, or is building, a good reputation in the market.  Many years ago, I worked for company A, that had a terrible reputation for customer service (not all of it deserved).  We ran a benchmarking exercise against one of the most famous high street retailers (company B), who had a great reputation for customer service.  To our surprise what we discovered, when the complaints were analysed, was that both companies had similar numbers of complaints per 100 customers. The difference was in customer perception. Company A’s customers saw a complaint (however well it was dealt with) as just another one of a litany of complaints against a terrible company that they wanted to leave as soon as possible, Company B’s customers felt they were unlucky, it was a one off, and it would be dealt with well. They stayed loyal.  It was all down to market reputation.

But the largest bit of the iceberg, the bit that really does the damage, is the attitude of organisations to their customer facing staff.  My first ever boss, when I was a very junior buyer at Rediffusion, had a ritual on factory visits: “always ask to go the toilet when you are doing the tour of the shop floor, say you can’t wait until you get back to the executive suite, because then you will discover what they really think of their people”. 

It was a great lesson, even if it meant I saw some sights I’d rather not have seen. Often it made me realise that the company’s mantra of “our people are our greatest asset” was a blatant lie, they didn’t care about them at all. A visit to the staff canteen rather than the director’s dining room generally gave another clue.

I also learnt that companies that did not care about their people generally did not care about the quality of their products either.

If the people in your call-centres and on your reception desks, are underpaid and under-valued they will not represent your company at its best. If senior managers do not spend some of their time answering phones and managing complaints in the call centre, rather than sitting in endless internal meetings, then they will miss so many of those little warning signs about products and services that never reach senior levels. They will also discover what pressures are put on call handlers and what facilities are available to them.

Customer facing people are your organisation’s shop window – why decorate it with undervalued and dispirited people?