What do your employees unwittingly communicate to to customers about how
important they are to the company?
Despite the focus on customer service, customer experience and more recently
customer engagement, the following examples of employee behaviours are still
common - and of course impact how customers feel about the company.
It's Too Much Trouble
I was out shopping for chocolate at the weekend. Needing gifts for 27 people
I went into an extremely well known chocolate retailer and explained what I
wanted. I expected to be treated as a valuable customer - instead what she
assistant said was "I don't know whether I can let you have that many. I'll
have to go and look in the stockroom to check we have enough." And then she
disappeared behind the scenes, returning a few minutes later with all that I'd
asked for. We completed the transaction, valued at £150, but not once did she
thank me for my business.
Reading between the lines, what I heard in her words was: "Oh no,
now I've got to go and look in the stockroom. How inconvenient, why couldn't
you just have a box or two like every other customer."
I suspect that's not what Head Office would have wanted her to
communicate.
The Task I'm Doing is More Important Than You
In the village where I live there are two reasonably sized convenience
stores. In one, whenever the queue at the tills goes down the assistants emerge
from behind the counter to restock shelves, tidy, sweep and keep the store well
presented. But when the queue grows again they're much slower to jump back on
the tills and often the remaining assistant has to ask for help two or three
times before it happens - whilst customers look on.
When they do it what it says to me is: "Tasks around the shop are
more important than you - so wait until we're ready to serve
you."
Excuse Me, I'm Talking!
The folks who work in the other store in my village seem to really get on
well. They never stop talking. No really, they just don't stop! What
they watched on TV last night, where they're going tonight, what they think
about the weather. Anything goes really, just as long as customers don't
interrupt their conversation. I'm regularly served around their conversation
without a word being said to me, and sometimes even with no eye contact.
What I imagine them saying behind the scenes about customers:
"We enjoy working here. It'd be even better if we weren't always
being interrupted by customers."
It's Not My Job
I rang my mortgage provider last week. I was expecting to get straight
through to the Contact Centre but evidently got an incorrect extension and spoke
to someone in some sort of support area. After he'd asked me what number I rang
he said that I'd come through to an incorrect number and that he couldn't
help. He then asked me to call a different number. When I asked him to get
someone to ring me instead he reluctantly took my number and said he'd pass it
on.
What he really meant was: "My job's not to serve customers.
Don't you realise I have more important things to do?"
Can You Call Back?
I recently called a company to check on the progress of an order I'd placed
for some printing. The guy I'd spoken to when making the order was great, and
so I asked specifically for him again. His colleague asked me to call back
later as he was out at lunch. Instead I asked if he could take a message and
get him to call me back. Given his initial silence, followed by a further long
wait whilst he got a pen and paper he said he'd try to get him to call me that
afternoon. It didn't fill me with confidence!
What I understood from his reaction was: "We don't take messages
and promise to call customers back. It's better not to promise it because it
probably won't happen."
Leaders in every business would I'm sure say that these are isolated
incidents, and down to just one or two rogue employees. But do they really know
whether that's the case? Are they measuring the experience customers get? And
whether they are or not, what does it say about the emphasis on customers in the
company when these things are allowed to go unchecked?
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield
Twitter:
@accordengage
Telephone: 0044 07906650019
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