Chapter 20

 It’s an Internal Organ

Consider this statement: Your employees are unlikely to treat your customers any better than they feel they’re treated by your company.

Would you agree?

What do you think of this statement: The service your customers receive is only as good as the service your employees give to each other.

Service Is an Inside Job

Many of the most successful, best run companies we know operate with a philosophy that their first customers to please are the good people on the company payroll.

Many well-run companies also operate with a philosophy that says each employee should treat other employees as their customers. And that’s especially true for the administrative arms of an organization: the Human Resource department, Accounting, Purchasing, Legal, Facilities, and so on. These are people whose job is to support the other people in the company who are making products or directly interacting with customers (sales, customer service, technical support).

---

 Tales from the Real World
Some companies allow for competition between internal support functions and external vendors. Take a company’s internal Information Systems Department. These folks are supposed to identify the computing needs of their internal clients and supply the appropriate hardware and software. Many times in their consulting work, Ron and Don have run into clients who had to go outside the company to purchase the right solutions because their internal support system didn’t supply the appropriate technology.

 

Internal support departments have a monopoly, but need to act as though they were earning their customer’s business. While you may have a monopoly inside, it still won’t prevent your customers from going to the outside if you don’t provide the desired level of service.

---

Help Your Colleagues Help You

When running a sales support department many years ago, Don was fond of saying, “We give great service, but we can’t read minds, and miracles require a week’s notice.” He was referring to an all too common frustration faced by internal support departments: they’re expected to produce the impossible on demand, with no advance notice.

---

 At Your Service
If your service team supports the actions of the sales team, you should communicate all service-related issues to the appropriate salesperson. If the salesperson deals with her customer without full knowledge of everything that’s happening with the account, she won’t be prepared to appropriately serve her customer. Of course, this is a two-way street. Your customer service support system should support this kind of two-way communication.

---

The basic key to support departments making their fullest contribution—giving the best service they possibly can to their internal customers—is to be “in the loop.” The more information internal support units have about what they may be required to do to support everything the company wants to do to please customers, the better they can do it.

Let’s say your customer service group is going to need to upgrade its telecommunication equipment, move to larger quarters, hire more service reps, and upgrade the skills of your current customer care givers. The sooner you bring your computer support people, your facilities people, purchasing, training, and HR people into the discussion, the sooner they can help you get the job done and create the appropriate customer service environment.

Good internal service is usually dependent on good internal communication. And good communication is at the heart of good service. That’s true with external customers and it’s true with internal ones. Talk to your colleagues in the departments that serve the customer service function, and the ones you serve (sales, marketing, manufacturing, shipping, etc.) The more you interact on a colleague-to-colleague basis, the more likely you are to get the benefit of information exchanged informally.

Companies with good casual information exchange always respond more quickly and smoothly than those dependent upon formal memos and meetings. After all, what is bureaucracy but an excess of formal communication and procedure?

Look in the Mirror

We know that a place of business isn’t supposed to be a party. And that working isn’t supposed to be a non-stop fun-fest. But we also know that happy people who believe in their employer and feel that their colleagues are supportive of their work give better service than miserable cynics who feel like they’re fighting their own co-workers.

Try to answer these two questions:

1. How well treated do your employees feel?
2. How do you know?

If your answer to the second question is: “Because I know,” there’s a strong possibility that you really don’t know the answer to the first question.

Knowing how your employees feel they’re treated is paramount to your ability to provide great service to both internal and external customers. Unfortunately, many times executives answer the question from their own point of view instead of seeking the opinions from the people who count. Then they don’t have the answers, only dangerous assumptions.

Employee Surveys

We encourage companies to formally survey employees about their satisfaction with the company. The objective is to gauge their support for the corporate mission and to identify their concerns. Employee surveys can reveal roadblocks that stand in the way of your firm providing the greatest value to customers, which prevents negative experiences and can create negative Instants of Absolute Judgment.

If you’ve not had a tradition of surveying your employees, you might find a healthy dose of skepticism as a reaction to your first survey. Assure employees that the surveys are completely anonymous, and that you’re interested in the results to build a better company. What should you expect for a response rate? The first time out it could be anything. If you have an employee problem, and the trust level is low, the response level will likely be low. If employees trust you but are eager to tell you of problems, you may see a response rate greater than 90 percent. The average response rate in companies for employee surveys is right around two-thirds. When participation isn’t voluntary, employees may feel coerced and that probably will negatively skew the results.

Sample Employee Satisfaction Survey

The following is a sample employee satisfaction survey. It’s probably longer than what you would want to use with your own employees, but it gives a broad range of questions that you might consider using with your own colleagues.

Scoring

There are many ways to score the results. Some companies will put certain values on each answer such as:

These values help you tabulate and come up with the statistics you’re looking for. Our purpose here is not to teach you how to tabulate surveys, but to suggest that you need to think about it or engage the services of a qualified research professional or firm to help you. Information not properly analyzed is useless to you.

---

 At Your Service
In every survey you use, it’s important to include a section soliciting open-ended comments from your respondents. Many times, they’ll tell you things you didn’t even imagine to ask about. The bits of information you can get in this section are nuggets of gold vital to your success.

---

Action!

Just as we advised in Chapter 14 concerning customer satisfaction surveys, you need to use research results as an agenda for action.

If a significant percentage of your employees tell you they don’t believe they have the information necessary to do their jobs well, then you need to find out what they need but don’t have. If they tell you they don’t believe top management has a clear direction for the company, you’d better find one or get better at communicating the one you have.

Surveys aren’t exercises for satisfying idle curiosity. They cost too much to produce, administer, and tabulate, not to mention taking the productive time of all your employees. You need to take an honest look at the survey results, and then take honest action to address what you find.

---

 Tales from the Real World
Finding out how your employees feel should not be limited to internal surveys. You should be soliciting the same information from your customers, such as: were you treated nicely and politely, and did your customer service representative care about your situation? Many times employees telegraph their anger and hostility through their level of service, especially when they feel they have no one else to talk to. Ron knows this first hand through the service he used to receive in the pre-Gordon Bethune days of Continental Airlines. It’s amazing what one man can do to help change the environment.

---

Service Survey-Itis

It has become popular for internal service departments such as Human Resources or Information Technology to occasionally survey their “internal customers.” To many a manager’s surprise, such surveys receive either a low response rate, mostly negative reviews, or both. Sometimes this happens even in the face of what seems to be solid improvements in the work they do to support people in other departments.

---

 Watch It!
If you take more than one survey of employees without taking real action to address the concerns they clearly expressed in the survey, expect a backlash. Employees don’t want to have to tell you the same thing year after year. Why bother? Surveys without action feel like make-work: dig the hole; fill the hole; dig the hole; fill. . . .

---

To ensure a higher rate of response to your surveys, make sure you clearly describe the value the respondent will receive from his effort in filling it out. For instance, you may want to insert this sentence at the top of your surveys . . . “We value your time and effort. By taking the time to fill this survey out, we will be in a better position to provide you with the tools and information you need to succeed.”

What Gives?

The people responsible for performing the work of your company are under pressure. They’re being asked to cut costs, increase sales, create more competitive innovations, and do it in less and less time.

---

 Watch It!
The quest to improve internal service can take on a life of its own. Formal surveys, “feedback” meetings, and the like can suck up a lot of time that “line management” wants to spend trying to serve the customers that make or break the business: those on the outside. The ones that pay money to your company to do its core work. Yes, you need good internal service. But providing it shouldn’t get in the way of providing great service to your real customers.

---

Frankly, they’re not too interested in getting a memo that says “This survey MUST be returned by Monday at 9 a.m. sharp.”

A common phrase we hear from line department managers about their well-intending colleagues in support departments goes like this: “Those guys forget who’s working for whom!”

Of course, everyone on the company team should be working to support the company’s mission as it relates to working—together—for external customers. Distractions from the core mission, no matter how well intended, take away from the company’s focus, and ultimately, from how well it serves customers.

We once worked with a colleague who grew visibly tired of the time spent on internal “nicey-nice.” The executive viewed the surveys and meetings from the internal departments that were supposed to help him do his job better as unwanted assignments and obligations. He became quite bold and vocal about it— frequently repeating a remark reflecting his frustration, “As this company goes out of business, we’re going to do it with the best HR department in the industry!”

Sarcastic? Sure. But it sends an important warning.