Customer Service in Today’s Market Part 2

Customer Service in Today’s Market Part 2

“Morale to physical is three to one.” –Napoleon

There are other, more fundamental ways of improving customer service besides making official policies and trying to make your employees stick to them. Don’t get me wrong, we need the policies but there are ways you can enhance and improve how your employees treat customers at the one on one level with no new policy or rules at all.

As we all know, employee retention is threatening to be one of the most serious operational problems of our time. Unfortunately this issue may also threaten underlying conditions that one might not normally associate with it… customer service, for example. Another aspect of staffing problems, in relation to customer service, is the situation that there simply won’t be enough workers in the labor pool to fill all the service jobs that exist. Compound this problem with the fact that the impending retirement of the Baby-Boomers will drive the economy to be more service oriented (thereby creating more service industry jobs), and I promise you that your business will be affected in some way by human resource issues.

The good news is if your organization can learn to overcome these issues, you will have found yet another way to differentiate yourself from your competition and given yourself the best possible chance for success. Also, let’s be honest, not everyone will succeed in overcoming these problems and if you do, it will give you an opportunity to gain market share.

Following are three or so things we can do to overcome labor problems and, in fact, use the situation to our advantage as a way to improve customer service. Ironically, the following will sound amazingly similar to the basic 31/2 directives of marketing, and as strange as this may sound, it is the case. We first had to learn to market to clients instead of selling to customers. Now we will have to learn to market to employees, not only to retain them but also to keep them smiling for our clients.

Get new (additional) employees – Waiting to hire until a position comes open has always been the status quo. The future may demand a more active pursuit of good labor and you may find it less costly to hire an ‘apprentice’ at a lower rate that will be trained and ready to step into a position when it comes open, then it is to rush and hire someone at standard market rates at the last minute… knowing nothing about them or what can be expected from them. Looking for new employees when you’re not pressed to have them can also afford you the luxury of time and you will probably find new sources for labor that you wouldn’t have found, had you been harried when you were looking. As you may know, it is becoming more and more common to see college kids being recruited as early as two years into their studies. They are being offered paid apprenticeships and creative benefits that you or I would have salivated over. As a rule of thumb, the size of your company may dictate how aggressive you need to be in this area. The more employees you have, the more aggressive recruitment will benefit you.

Retain the employees you already have – One of the most important things to remember when making human resources policy is that money is not always the predominant factor in employee retention. According to a survey done by Chart Your Course International (www.chartcourse.com" target="_blank">http://www.chartcourse.com">www.chartcourse.com), the number one reason people stay at their present job is challenging job assignments (notice that I didn’t say ‘ridiculously hard’ or ‘unrealistic’ job assignments). There are also many creative ways to give benefits to your employees. For example, if a large percentage of your maid staff is single or low household income mothers, one option might be to offer their children or families access to your high-speed Internet connection in off peak hours to do homework, research or even shopping. Then the kids are taken care of for a little while and they have access to something they might not have at home. This would probably make the mother a better, more efficient and more satisfied worker. Your cost: having to relinquish some old, unutilized computers for them to use, without risking your business machines. Most importantly, people like to be recognized for their hard work and allowing them more control over their own work flow will allow them pride (ownership, if you will) in their own success.

Increase efficiencies – I’m afraid that there is no gentle way to deal with this. In the future you will have fewer resources in your labor pool than you have had in the past. The workload will not decrease. In fact it will probably be the other way. That being said; it is imperative for operations and customer service that managers learn how to improve efficiencies and productivity rates. Things like brutal schedules, merciless production goals and micro-management are not the answer and will improve neither your employee retention nor your customer service! Research and development is the key to finding what works for your company. The National Center on the Education Quality of the Workforce (EQW), for example, found the following:

In the non-manufacturing sector:

A 10% increase in the average education of all workers* is associated with a productivity increase of 11%
A 10% increase in hours results in an increase of 6.3%.

*Equivalent to slightly more than one additional year of schooling.

This implies that a service industry company’s money would be much better spent over time, on additional training or education as opposed to enforcing and supporting the over-time pay and liability of overly rigorous schedules.

Also, modern technology is no less than amazing and it can turn a multiple person job into a single person or in some cases an almost unattended job. The important thing with technology is learning to buy functional. It is easy to be dazzled by what modern machines can do, but learning to buy what you need, rather than what you want, is the key to a successful investment.

What does all this mean to your customer service? An experienced employee is typically less pressured because experience has taught them how to react to anything. A satisfied employee is quicker to smile or take adverse conditions in stride. An employee who has chosen to stay with your company will be infinitely more likely to go out of their way for the customer. Over all, a good, experienced, happy employee is exponentially more likely to provide good, consistent customer service (similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs).

Now, if I may be so bold as to make a prediction… In the not too distant future, we will see marketing consultation firms creating an operations department or merging with pre-existing operations consulting firms which will work with the marketing departments in all cases. This will prove to be true because customer service and sales are so deeply dependant on the disposition of the people who do these jobs. Employers will sell their company to their new recruits and the new recruits will, in turn, sell the company to the company’s clients. No way will future customers believe in a company or its product (and sincere belief is the future of sales) if the company’s staff, itself, does not.