Chapter 3

Just Who Serves the Customer Around Here?

Depending on the type of business you work in, lots of different people in different functional areas may interact with your customers. Those customer contact functions might include:

• Sales
• Telemarketing
• Credit
• Order processing
• Shipping
• Technical support
• Collections
• Customer service

That’s a lot of people who might reach out and touch customers. And with all those possible contacts, there’s plenty of opportunity for confusion.

The Great Debate

Whose job is it? Who owns the customer? That sounds like a question only for people concerned with organizational politics. After all, if you were to poll your customers and ask them, “Who at Amalgamated Enterprises owns you?,” chances are pretty darn good that 99.95 percent of the respondents would reply, “No one owns me; and I don’t really care very much about Amalgamated Enterprises!”

Still, the issue of “who owns the customer” gets even nonpolitical people’s juices flowing. That’s because at the heart of the question is the complex issue of how to truly deliver on the belief that your company should provide outstanding service.

From Fragments to Process

Customers can get lost in the shuffle, or worse, caught in the cross-fire, when dealing with many different departments in a company. That’s especially true if the different departments don’t communicate well—or at all. The following diagrams show the old and new views of customer contact departments, where work was “handed off” from one department to another.

In the old, fragmented model of customer service, each customer contact was handled by a separate department with little or no coordination. No one was sure what was going on.

Think of customer service as a coordinated system, a process that integrates a wide collection of tasks. When that is a truly collaborative effort between different functional groups in the company, no one has to worry about whether the Marketing department or the Sales department or the Operations department or anyone else “owns” the customer—because everyone does.

In the new, cohesive model of customer service, communication and information flow between the customer and all the customer contact functions. Everyone knows what’s going on.

How Are You Operating?

Below are signs of an integrated, coordinated commitment to customers. Use this checklist to assess whether you’re operating in the new cohesive model, or back in the fragmented one:

 Customer needs and requirements are clearly understood in every corner of the organization

 Work is viewed in terms of the whole process not just one department passing work from it to another department

 Work groups with employees from several different functional areas jointly take responsibility for making sure that all work activities 1) are coordinated, and 2) serve the customer, not the company

 Information is shared between work teams and functional departments

 Technology supports information sharing

 Policy and procedure changes are made only after consulting other functional groups to assess unexpected impact on customers

 Problems that arise are viewed as opportunities to improve the process of serving customers; there is no blaming, only working together to improve things

Who Is the Convenience for?

Don buys some office supplies from one of those humungous discount warehouse clubs. Printer cartridges are displayed in a glass case. To buy a printer cartridge, you are supposed to pick up a numbered plastic tag corresponding to the numbered print cartridge on display. Then you take the plastic tag to the check-out stand, pay for the item, and then take your receipt to another counter to pick up the cartridge.

At best, this is not an elegant system. But it’s made worse when the tags are missing from the display, making it impossible to purchase the merchandise without chasing down an employee to find a solution to a problem that should have been prevented.

When Don goes to the customer service counter for assistance, the contact people are very friendly and very eager to help. They immediately summon a department floor worker to write up a note with the item number on it so the cartridge can be purchased without the plastic tag. Sometimes (yes, this has happened a few times), the floor person is busy selling a big ticket item and can’t reasonably rush over to scribble out a note. Eventually, the clerk makes his way over to the small display case and very nicely prepares the little chit for the purchase.

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 Watch It!
Turf battles and empire building are destructive forces in a company. When managers start fights over who owns the customer, they’re usually looking to gain political power.

 

Sometimes it’s the opposite: managers don’t want to be bothered, and shirk their customer responsibilities, saying it’s not their department’s job.

 

The question that should be central to every management team: “How can we maximize customer value and satisfaction by working the most effectively together?”

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Don has grown tired of this little time-wasting exercise and has begun looking for another place to purchase his printer cartridges. Morals of the story:

1. Customer service springs from a well-designed system that prevents creating problems for customer contact people to solve.
2. People who stock shelves or replace little plastic tags or do other seemingly minor tasks need to understand how important their little part of the process is to the whole objective of satisfying customers.
3. Even the nicest, friendliest, most helpful customer service people cannot compensate for the inconvenience caused by an uncoordinated or poorly conceived service system.

Make sure your system is convenient for the customer, not just your company and employees.

Community Property

No matter how many internal groups have responsibility for customer contact, truly great customer service comes from everyone in the whole company working as though their job is to please customers. Because it is!

Believing that is one thing; making it part of the way your company works day after day is another. Let’s look a little closer at how you can make continually great service a reality.

Culture and Style

When you try to make everyone in the company feel that they have responsibility for giving your customers great service, you don’t just issue a memo saying, “Effective January 1^st we will all start giving great customer service.” Great service needs to become part of the company personality.

Companies, like individuals, have a distinct personality. That personality comes from your company’s unique history, the customers you serve, the people on the payroll, and your firm’s values and traditions. Management gurus call this stuff corporate culture.

Your company may make and sell exactly the same product as several other companies. But no two companies will be alike in the way they make and sell a product, even if they use very similar physical processes. An important difference is in the company personality or culture. You need to know a few important things at this point:

• Every company has its own unique culture

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   Word to the Wise
  The unique style of how your business operates is known as corporate culture. Each firm has a distinct corporate culture based on its traditions, and the values and personalities of the people working for the organization.

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• Providing great service to customers must become an essential part of your company’s corporate culture
• Evolving a corporate culture to greatly value service is a huge, on-going job requiring the commitment of top management, and the cooperation of everyone else

Giving your customers great service is impossible if your corporate culture doesn’t support it. So you have to build a culture that does.

Make Customer Service Everyone’s Job

Do your employees have job descriptions? That’s how everyone knows what they’re supposed to do, right?

Have you read a job description lately? What does it say? Does it list tasks and duties?

That stuff is okay, but it’s incomplete. It doesn’t clearly tell your employees what’s important about their jobs. And that, of course, is creating happy customers who want to come back again and again to your business.

You need to put customer service in everyone’s job description. Add a sentence or two at the beginning of every employee’s job description that says: “The [describe job] exists to help Our Company serve customers better. The really important outcome of this job is [describe whatever it is]. That helps Our Company to prosper by satisfying and delighting those wonderful people who make your job possible—our customers—by [describe].”

Let’s see how this approach works for a couple of real jobs away from the front line of customer contact.

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 At Your Service
If you want to make customer service an important part of your corporate culture, make customer service an important part of every employee’s job description and evaluation for compensation. Don’t visibly care about customers? No raise for you, pal! Let everyone know that their job, in some way, affects the very life blood of your business, your customers.

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Example 1. The overnight sanitation crew member position exists to help Our Company serve customers better. The really important outcome of this job is to provide a clean, sanitary, and inviting work atmosphere for your fellow employees at Our Company. That helps Our Company to prosper by satisfying and delighting those wonderful people who make your job possible—our customers—by providing a physical working environment that encourages everyone at Our Company to do their very best work.

Example 2. The financial analyst position exists to help Our Company serve customers better. The really important outcome of this job is to provide well-researched, well-reasoned, and inspired thinking to assist intelligent decision-making at Our Company. That helps Our Company to prosper by satisfying and delighting those wonderful people who make your job possible—our customers—by putting Our Company’s precious financial resources to their very best use.

By putting the customer service connection into all job descriptions, you help to create the link between every job in the company and a service culture. You strengthen that link when you show employees how their job—no matter how far removed from actual customer contact—impacts customers in some important way.

Make Customer Service Part of Pay

You need to put your money where your slogan is. Do you really care about customers? Make that service commitment part of every employee’s performance evaluation and compensation. At the periodic performance review do the following:

• Ask, “How did your work impact our customers in the past quarter?” (You are doing quarterly or monthly performance reviews aren’t you?)
• Tie compensation to the answer you get to the above, or more importantly, to the actions you’ve observed that employee taking to back up the answer.

Management Model

Does your corporate culture come with an “owner’s manual”? Even if you have a big old Policy & Procedures manual, it probably doesn’t describe “how things really work around here.”

Corporate culture is communicated in many ways even if it’s not written down anywhere. One of the most powerful ways of creating and communicating an organization’s culture comes from the way company managers behave. Employees learn a lot about what an organization truly values from the way their bosses behave.

Word and Deed

Employees learn by example. Let’s say they read a memo that says, “Treat your customers with respect.” But they feel management doesn’t treat them with respect. Guess what they believe the true culture is?

If the company newsletter says, “We must get to know our customers as individuals and establish a relationship with them,” but employees never see top management anywhere near a customer, they conclude something else about the company’s true culture.

Imagine that a manager gives a speech to employees and tells them to be warm, friendly, and inviting to customers. But this same manager barely knows the names of her employees and rarely talks to them at all. That tells employees something very different about the real culture at the company.

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 Tales from the Real World
T. Scott Gross, an author who gives seminars on customer service and sales, points to Herb Kelleher, chairman of Southwest Airlines. “On Thanksgiving weekend, one of the heaviest travel weekends of the year, Herb Kelleher can be found at an airport. Not directing operations,” Scott says, “but handling baggage. By working side-by-side with his employees, he shows that he knows and appreciates that his employees have to be there on the holiday.”

 

Other top executives deomonstrate how to show commitment to good service by staying in touch with customers and employees. Bill Marriott is often found at his Marriott hotel properties talking to front-line workers. The late, great Sam Walton loved nothing better than touring his Wal-Mart stores and surprising employees, to their delight, with his visit.

 

When top management shows a keen interest in the operation, everyone else tends to pay attention, too.

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In education, they call it modeling. In management consulting, we call it monkey see, monkey do. Whatever you call it, a corporate culture grows out of employees mirroring the actions of their managers. How you behave as a manager shouts to your employees what you really value.

Setting the Example

To create a service culture, show employees what it means to serve. Think of your employees as your customers. Treat them that way. Let them learn from your example.

No matter what example you set, you are communicating what you expect and value.

Creating a Culture of Cooperation

There’s nothing more powerful than a whole company mobilized to deliver great service. Individual employees create great service when they work collaboratively with employees in other departments to please customers.

Depending on your current corporate culture, getting people to move across functional boundaries to work with their colleagues in other departments may seem as natural as breathing or as uncomfortable as trying to squeeze into jeans three sizes too small.

Getting It Going

Here are a few simple ways to promote, demonstrate, and celebrate a culture of cooperation:

• Encourage your employees to share information across department lines. Better yet, erase the very idea of department lines. Suggest that your employees view the company as, in the words of a client of Don’s, “one big team made up of many smaller teams.”
• Urge your employees to participate on cross-functional teams (more on this in Chapter 17).

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   Watch It!
  When the big boys and girls don’t play well together, everyone knows it and that trickles down. An enthusiastic espirit de corps at the top becomes a role model for everyone else. Make sure you don’t forget to demonstrate cooperation at the senior executive level.

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• Create opportunities to meet people from other parts of the company. Try shared staff meetings with work groups from other functional areas. Maybe some joint pizza lunches. Get people talking informally in a neutral, stress-free environment.
• Use the company newsletter, bulletin board, voice mail, or whatever communication media you have available to you. Spread the good news about people in different functional areas working together to please customers. If you get any letters or positive comments from customers, promote the collaboration behind the success stories. Hold up good examples of cooperative behavior for all to see.

Strike a Deal

Back in the Dark Ages, when political turf wars and power struggles were more important to executives than customer satisfaction scores, Don faced a difficult dilemma. He was responsible for the promotional launch of a new software product at a company he had just joined. The problem wasn’t the major project. That’s simply hard work. The problem was his new boss prohibited him from having any contact with key people on the product development team. Apparently, shortly before Don arrived, the folks in development crossed swords with the folks in marketing. Executive feud. Stand off. And that was that.

But not quite. Taking career in hand, Don took a brave, secret trip down the elevator and walked into the development director’s office. After the executive warned Don that he risked his new career by being there, they shut the door. After some tense initial moments of distrust, they struck a deal to cooperate and share important information. They did exactly that and helped to create the most successful product launch in the company’s 100-plus year history.

21 Ways to Know It’s Working

When you’ve created a culture of service, and your internal departments are working together to serve customers, something should happen. Actually, several good things should happen.

Reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1997 Kaset International (a Times Mirror Training Company)