Tag: communication

Promotion

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There are two ways organizations promote employees.

One is by tenure. The employee has been in one role for long enough that they kind of outgrew it. The promotion is often formal and comes at the end of a process. It is about dues and achievement.

The other is by stretch. The employee is given enough space that they can grow into it. The promotion is often informal and comes at the beginning of a process. It is about responsibility and potential.

The way your organization does this has much to do with whether the general belief is that trust should be earned or that trust should be given. And it says a lot about many other aspects of the culture.

Acceptable and achievable

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The stories we are told about what leaders have done and what peers have done have a strong impact on the way we will behave.

What leaders have done shape our view of what is acceptable.

What peers have done make the acceptable desirable (and achievable) for us too.

Instead of leaving your organization in the arbitrary hands of internal gossiping and politicking, use stories strategically to guide behavior.

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.

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.

Negative impressions

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Reporting on tens of different metrics give one of two impressions.

Impression #1 – You are shooting in the dark. Since you can’t agree on what success means, you are just tracking and reporting everything in the hope that some of the numbers will look good on your deck to the board.

Impression #2 – You are going to cheat. Many metrics mean infinite interpretations, and something tells me that the one you are going to deliver today is not a story of failure.

Next time you are preparing a report, make an effort to avoid both.