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Recently I did an introductory session in 'Meet and Greet' for a group of floor associates of a retail chain. After the
first session, I had a meeting with the Vice President Human Resources on how
to take the program ahead. We had a 90minute discussion, delving deeper from
the present to where they wish to head, what needs to be done and how to go
about doing it. By the end of the discussion, it was evident that leadership
needed more involvement in service initiatives than the floor associates need
the training.
Management felt training would help the
associates, but with introspection, it dawned that leaders needed to have their
finger on the pulse where service was concerned. The discussion and my
observations brought to light gaps in communication from outlet heads to
management, lack of awareness on what was happening in the store. Their online
complaint handling process was far from professional.
With frontline usually bearing the brunt of service delivery, it is time to see customer experience from a different perspective. Yes, I am referring to leadership!
Are leaders truly involved in driving the
service culture in an organisation?
If so, what are they doing about it?
Leadership's involvement plays a key role
in driving the customer experience initiatives in any organisation, because
they set the pace for others to maintain. A true service culture happens when
all are involved and not customer facing employees alone
Here are a few concrete kick-off actions
leaders can initiate in understanding their service standards
1.
Leaders
have to include customer complaints in the agenda of their management meeting. They
have to diligently review customer feedback.
2. Analyze
top cases and assign them to senior managers to resolve. This would give them the
opportunity to have the finger on the pulse and set the pace.
3.
Check
the number of cases closed and lessons learnt for the next management meeting.
4. Managers
should make at least one customer visit every month, senior management should
do one customer visit in three months and top management to visit customers every
six months. I mean formal visits to their office and not social meetings at a
party or event.
5. Complaint
resolution and customer visits by leaders to be linked to management KPI's.
6. Form
a task force of frontline staff to suggest recommendations to management. These
suggestions should be implemented and if not implemented, give sufficient
reasons with a request to further review and revise.
7. Demonstrate
a healthy cross functional engagement with customers for all in the
organisation to emulate
How does this help?
-
In
addition to feedback from their teams this will help leaders get factual
feedback from the customer
- It
will ensure leaders work with their teams, understand what is happening and
what improvement needs to be done with their processes and policies
- It
helps leaders to get closer to their teams and understand their challenges,
resulting in similar reactions from frontline who will feel motivated while handling
customers.
-
And
for the customer, it would be a breath of fresh air. Having senior management
visit them would literally mean business. It would give them a very different
feeling.
-
For
the organization, they would be setting themselves apart from competition with
a unified focus and vision.
So, is it too much to ask leaders to
devout time for the customer in their management meetings? For all the time leaders
spent in meetings, I doubt!
In fact this should be one of the core
business of leaders to pursue. A conscious effort from leaders to focus on
service and customer experience will act as a key differentiator for the business.
It would take them far ahead from competition.
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