Author: Fabrizio

Windows

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Recruitment is customer service.

For many employees, their first contact with your organisation is via your recruitment function. For most people, the only interaction with your organisation is with your recruitment function.

Both recruitment and customer service deal with a high volume of traffic that makes it difficult to identify what matters. And in both cases, this challenge often translates in poor service and missed opportunities.

The fact is, recruitment and customer service are windows through which people look inside the organisation. They might become employees or not, they might become customers or not. But for sure they will leave with a clear impression of what you stand for – an impression that will spread to the people with whom they will share the experience.

Recruitment and customer service are powerful tools for word-of-mouth.

It is worth investing in them with intention and strategy.

Critics, cheerleaders, and coaches

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Sometimes you need a critic, as they might take you back to earth and set you on a path of improvement. Sometimes you need a cheerleader, as they might give you that boost of confidence you are lacking to truly appreciate what you have just achieved.

And you always need a coach. They will see your trajectory and help you find what you need to get there.

Most of what is good

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You need to be able to discern between different shades and understand that most of what is good happens in the middle.

You can support a candidate even if their thinking does not match yours 1:1.

You can have a conversation with someone even when you do not share the same view of the world.

You can be committed to a project even when it’s a cause of stress and disappointment.

You can love someone even if your heart does not beat faster every time you see them.

You can appreciate a person even though you would not give them certain responsibilities.

Idealizing and romanticizing is the enemy of contentment.

Give meaning

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It’s not that the ideas for ways to keep your team engaged are scarce – in fact here are 37 of them.

The point is that managers struggle to understand that these days – perhaps most of the time, but these days in particular -, people do not get excited for a new work project, for the last quarter extraordinary results, or for the announcement of the new CTO.

People seek meaning, and enabling connection with peers and colleagues is one sure way to give it to them.

The fact that with remote work the task is more difficult should merely be an incentive to explore new and creative ways.

Post-sale nuisance

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One thing many customer service professionals fail to understand about customer service is that their work is not fixing issues.

It might be that a customer reaching out for a late delivery, an unexpected charge, a faulty product actually wants that rectified. But that’s only on the surface. What matters infinitely more is for them to find somebody to connect with. Somebody who can chat with them through a bad customer experience – and sometimes something more that goes on in their lives. Customers want to be heard and respected. And that’s why sharing ten possible solutions to their superficial problem is often ineffective, even when one of the ten might actually help them.

For companies to not look at customers as post-sale nuisances, they need to invest in a customer service that starts with empathy and does not immediately falls prey to problem solving. A customer service that says I am sorry, that explains what is going on, that asks smart questions, that forgets about the script, that takes the customer by hand and guides them towards what’s next – which, by the way, might be a non-resolution.

Of course, that will mean some of the metrics will be off.

And in that case, just make sure you are measuring the right ones.