On Wed, 4 Jun 1997 Ryder.Jones@msas.com wrote:
> An Amex ad states, "Good service is not difficult, just hire
> nice people," which is a large part of it, but even nice
> people spouting friendly messages cannot hide the
> insincerity of an uncommitted or solely profit oriented
> organisation behind them. It is evident not just in
> attitudes expressed in moments of pressure but the
> reflection of restrictive policies ("I'm sorry I can't do
> that, the computer/policy/boss won't let me"). As my
> organisation has found to its chagrin, lashings of customer
> service training only frustrate the employees further by
> insulting their natural friendliness and intelligence.
Karl Albrecht calls this "smile training." It's based on the
misconception, identified by Deming, that all quality problems stem from
employees not doing exactly what the boss tells them to do, and that the
majority of employees are bunched together at the low end of Murray and
Herrnstein's renowned Bell Curve.
The real problem, as I see it, is that employees are expected to achieve
managers' internal goals, which are often contrary to what the company
needs to do to attract and retain customers (which is in turn what the
company needs to do to make a profit). An example of such an internal
goal would be "deal with X customers per hour." This sort of goal leads
front-line employees to perceive their job as "getting rid of customers"
rather than servicing them. Any customer with non-routine needs is seen
(for good reason) as a threat to the employee's performance rating. While
customers in general like to receive quick service, most of the factors
that determine how long a customer/service-person interaction requires are
completely out of the control of individual employees. Some of them are
completely out of the control of anyone but the customer (e.g. customer
calls in, gets halfway through the transaction, and then says "hold on,
let me get something to write with"); others require action on the part of
management to change the system (e.g customer in checkout line brings item
that isn't in pricing database; in a typical supermarket, this results in
everybody standing in line while someone else has to be called in to do a
price check).
There's a widespread perception on the part of the public that most
front-line employees aren't very smart. IMHO, this isn't because these
employees lack brains, but because they're required to check their brains
at the door each morning. And there's a self-fulfilling prophecy going
on; when management doesn't let employees use their intelligence,
management stops perceiving that employees *have* intelligence.
--Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>