A retailer recently sought my help because he
had an employee who regularly irritated two or three customers a day.
"Otherwise she is very good at her job," he told me, "but there
is something about her attitude and manner that really gets up customers'
noses. I'm getting tired of dealing with the almost daily complaints about her
behaviour."
We reviewed the process that leads to getting
staff to do the right things:
-
Does she understand the importance of providing
a great customer experience?
-
Does she know how she needs to behave to create
that experience?
-
Has she been told customers are complaining
about her?
-
Does she understand what she is doing that
causes these complaints?
-
Does she know this is a serious problem because it
discourages customers from coming back and encourages them to tell others about
their bad experience?
-
Does she acknowledge she needs to change her
behaviour?
-
Has she agreed to change?
-
Have you provided her with coaching to help her
change?
The answer to all of these questions was a
resounding, yes. I asked if there was any evidence she had tried to change
and the answer to that question was, no. "In that case," I told him,
" You will have to start the process of dismissing her. She is too big a
risk to your business to keep her around."
The retailer was shocked. From the look on
his face you would have thought I had suggested he sold his children into
slavery. "We don't fire people," he said indignantly. "We are
not that kind of company." I asked if they were the kind of company
who looked after their customers. "Of course we are," he replied.
I told him that in this case he couldn't be both. By choosing not to take
a hard line with his employee, he was choosing to expose his customers to the
very high risk they would have a bad customer experience.
I have long believed the recipe for the
effective management of people is to be 50% supportive and 50% demanding.
Clearly, if we are too demanding and insufficiently supportive we will create a
culture of fear. That will lower morale and kill any desire to look after the
customer, especially if that means doing something extra, spending money or
bending a rule. On the other hand, if we are too supportive and not demanding
enough, people do not give their best. They cruise and take the easy way out
and it is often the customer who suffers.
I think in New Zealand and Australia we often
fall into the trap of being too supportive and not demanding enough. I see a
lot of mystery shopping results and I see stores that constantly fall well
below the company’s standard in spite of management’s repeated efforts to help
them improve. My question to the senior managers of these companies is, ‘Why do
you allow this situation to continue?’
Like my friend the retailer, we seem to be
reluctant to get tough with staff and consequently fail to protect our
customers from bad experiences. Sure, lots of us give an errant employee a
dressing down when they do something wrong but we don’t take the action we need
to take by removing the person from our customer’s world and fixing the problem
once and for all. This failure to follow up the warning with concrete action
just teaches the staff member they can ignore your warnings and continue to
behave as they always have done.
By saying all this I have probably ignited the
debate about whether you should put your staff or your customers first, and
many of you will believe you should look after your staff first. But I see no
conflict between the two. A customer is anyone using a product or service we
produce. Since the products and services of managers are things like policies,
resources, instructions and advice, the customers of managers are their staff.
As we have discussed many times, one of the keys to business success is to aim
to make your customers successful. So, as managers we should aim to make our
staff successful. But successful at what? Successful at creating a great
experience for their customers. That is why we need to be both supportive and
demanding. But just as there are a few paying customers you might choose not to
do business with because they are poor payers, dishonest or abusive, there are
staff you should choose not to keep because they do not respond to your efforts
to help them succeed in looking after your customers.
Here is another reason to deal firmly with staff
who continue to create bad experiences for your customers. If you do not engage
your staff, they will not look after your customers. Staff who are now engaged
will quickly become disengaged if they see you allow one of their colleagues to
behave in a way that is contrary to how you have been telling people they
should behave. You will quickly lose credibility and respect.
This may sound harsh but you have a
responsibility to your customers to remove all obstacles to them having a great
experience when they do business with you. After all, they produce 100% of your
profits. Obviously there is a process that needs to be followed to help staff
improve their performance and, if necessary, to dismiss them. Dismissal should
clearly be the last resort. But occasionally, it is an action that needs to be
taken. You owe it to both your customers and the rest of your staff to be tough
when the need arises.
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