Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (14 page)

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of the slowest runner in our group: Ezra’s nine-minute pace. Sooner or later, Marty’s going to say,
‘‘Hey, nine minutes is too slow. I’m out of here.’’

He’ll go somewhere else and find a new group of runners that runs a pace closer to his. It’s similar in business: When you hire an ill-suited employee, you don’t just slow down your business. You drive away your best-performing employees as well.

You may also drive away your best customers. Whenever you put together a mostly, but not consistently, excellent team, customers will usually interact with at least one sub-par employee. And we know that customers tend to judge firms by the
weakest
links they encounter in the customer service chain. That’s why even a few poor brand representatives can jeopardize your hard-earned customer loyalty.

Develop Selection Discipline

Developing an effective interview and selection process takes discipline.

Many businesses make use of science-based employee selection services.

Leonardo often makes use of the interview design resources from a company called Talent Plus, and Micah’s has seen good results with the Caliper system. As with outside survey resources, the best results are obtained when the outside organization or system accommodates your company’s own hiring criteria.

Whichever selection approach you decide is right for you, consider incorporating internal
personnel benchmarking
. This means that you systematically compare each new applicant’s profile to those of your own best performers and those of your standard performers, to see how they match up. (You won’t have this detailed personnel benchmarking data initially. You can build it up over time and incorporate it into your selection processes as it grows.)

Once you settle on a scientific approach to employment screening, don’t just use it as ‘‘seasoning’’—sprinkling a bit here or there as the mood strikes you, and skipping it when it doesn’t suit you. Whatever selection process you set up must be used with
every
recruit; otherwise 90

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you will never know how effective your tool is and what work may be needed to hone it.

Create a Powerful Orientation Process

Do you know—for certain—what the first day of work is like for your employees? Is there a chance it runs something like this?

The chief technician at the body shop looks at his new employee and says, ‘‘Welcome to our shop. What’s your name again? Jim? Oh, okay. Yes, welcome to our shop, Jim. Let me see your uniform, yeah; your shoes, okay. Do you have a pen, pencil, pad? Yep, you have everything. Okay, follow Bill.

He’ll show you everything that goes on in this shop.’’

So, the new employee follows Bill, who has been disgrun-

tled ever since he was demoted in ’02 because of his poor work ethic. Since then, Bill’s favorite job duty has been orienting new recruits. Out of earshot of the boss, he smiles wanly at Jim. ‘‘Let me tell you how it really works around here . . .’’

Around the world each day, careless orientations like this one are creating lasting negative expectations among employees. And executives and managers typically have no idea it’s happening. Be sure your precious first moments with an employee aren’t squandered (or worse).

Institute a careful, effective orientation process.

Use Orientation to Instill New Values, Attitudes,

and Beliefs

Employees are especially impressionable during their first days—and especially their
very first day
—on the job. This is because beginning any new job is disorienting, and psychologists have shown that during peri-

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ods of disorientation, people are particularly susceptible to adopting new roles, goals, and values. Those new values and beliefs might turn out to be subversive ones like Bill was trying to plant, or constructive ones like you want to seed. It depends largely on your orientation program.

With this in mind, we recommend that you focus your orientation process not on instilling practical know-how, but rather on instilling the most useful possible attitudes, beliefs, and goals. Keep the focus on what is most crucial for your business: core customer service principles, your company values, and why and how your employee is an essential part of the company’s overall mission. Don’t fritter away orientation on in-consequential details.
(‘‘This is the break room. We clean the employee fridge
out each Friday.’’)

Involve the highest leadership level possible, ideally the CEO, to personally
provide the orientation on values, beliefs, and purpose
. Sound impractical, even impossible? Consider this: Horst Schulze personally conducted every Day One orientation at every new Ritz-Carlton hotel and resort that opened worldwide, throughout his tenure. He now continues this tradition at the Capella and Solis hotels and resorts.

So, figure out a way. You only get one Day One.

Defining an Employee’s Underlying Purpose

A particularly crucial aspect of orientation is ensuring that a new employee understands her particular
underlying purpose
in your organization and appreciates its importance. An object can only have a function. A human being has both a function—his day-to-day job responsibilities—and a purpose—the reason why the job exists. (For example, ‘‘To create a memorable experience for our guests’’ is the purpose we hope will move our engineer off the ladder at the beginning of this book.) If an employee understands that she has an underlying essential purpose in your company, she’ll tend to respond to customers differently.

Among other things, she’ll try harder to comprehend what they need and to come up with creative ways to meet their needs. This can be a 92

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huge asset when confusing or stressful service situations arise, including situations that have never been planned for.

Even in a mundane situation, this simple understanding, starting from day one, can make all the difference. Have you ever been to a shopping mall and stared, obviously bewildered, at the map—while a security guard idly stands there ‘‘protecting’’ you, all of two feet away?

Did the security guard proactively help you out with an
‘‘Anything I can
help you find?’’
If he worked for us, he would have. At orientation, we would have started him off understanding his higher purpose:
to create a
great shopping experience for guests
. Sure, that could include deterring and apprehending bad guys, but it also includes attending to shoppers who have that unmistakable lost look on their faces.

The Orientation Process Begins Sooner Than You Think

The orientation process begins the moment an employee is told she’s been hired. From that point onward, every interaction with this incoming staffer will influence her beliefs about your company. So think carefully about all contact with the new recruit, including form letters your company sends her, how she is treated when she calls with a question about benefits, and so forth.

Orientation should then move into the emotionally compelling Day One component, a separate event that marks a dividing line between the past and the future. This conveys an important message: Your work life, your assumptions, even your values at work, are going to be different from this point forward.

On Day One, Nothing Is Tangential

Even seemingly peripheral aspects of your orientation program can influence a new employee’s relationship with your company. To get a first-hand appreciation for how important these aspects of orientation can be, suppose for a moment that you’re on the receiving end of orientation. You’re excited to be newly hired as a junior vice president. That Your People

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is, until the day you report to work and find you don’t have an active company phone line, a computer login, business cards, or most of the other tools you need. Yet they’ve known you were coming for three months: plenty of time to get your business cards, your company ID, your company credit card, your parking spot: all the helpful, practical items to get you up and running. You can already tell that the first week is going to be a week in limbo, and it’s raising questions in your mind about the company you’ve signed on with.
Your orientation is already
going badly before the scheduled sessions have even begun.

Now suppose that on Day One, the most influential day of your new job, you are wedged into a messy meeting room and given cock-eyed photocopies-of-photocopied handouts, asked to read them under buzzing fluorescent bulbs, and surrounded by strewn-about computer equipment. You’re now subliminally absorbing the kind of messages that lead to customers getting substandard, out of date, poorly aligned, messy service. Some orientation! It’s hard under such circumstances not to feel cynical about the speech from the senior vice president about the company’s ‘‘paramount value of excellence.’’

So when it’s
your
turn to be in charge, avoid conditioning employees negatively. Practice your Day One comments in front of a critical colleague until you can consistently deliver them superbly. Prepare the orientation rooms perfectly, with all the chairs tucked in straight, perfectly aligned, everything clean, and all the visuals effectively prepared.

Offer simple refreshments—piping hot coffee, fresh cookies—perfectly arranged. Use only good-quality, closely edited, and up-to-date handouts. (Go ahead and splurge: Print out fresh copies.)

Build a Brand Ambassador

After the emotion and drama of Day One, you settle into the long process of building the necessary skills for the new employee to perform the job. Most importantly, you initiate the ‘‘brand ambassador’’ process: the process that transforms a new recruit into an effective representative for your company. How long that takes depends on the nature of the 94

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brand, the particular employee, and the employee’s position. Building a brand ambassador can take two months, three months, six months, or a year. But it’s certainly not a one-week, two-week, or zero-week process.

Never permit a new employee to represent you in interactions with customers before he has completed your orientation process. Customers never deserve to be practiced on. The only exception to this is the

‘‘following’’ of another employee by a trainee, clearly represented as such, while the veteran being followed protects the customer from any negative impact.

Everyone’s an Expert

We recommend that current non-managerial employees (not just HR employees, but operational employees) participate in departmental recruiting, selection, hiring interviews, and orientation.

(Note that your relationship with an applicant is legally sensitive, so you need to do this with some care, and your employees will need training and supervision as they assume such responsibilities.) For any service-minded employee on your team, the chance to be involved in hiring instills a sense of pride in, engagement with, and commitment to the organization. By promoting a positive vision of the company to new recruits, and by working on selecting those recruits, your staff will naturally invest themselves more in the company’s mission. So it’s a terrific investment of your supervisory time and energy.

Training Employees to Anticipate . . .
Carefully

A key component of building a superb service team is
teaching
. You need to make a significant, ongoing investment in teaching your employees the skills they need to do their jobs properly. Business types usually call the teaching they do
training
. But training is just a variant of teaching.

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If you’ve observed any teachers closely, you know that theirs is a much tougher job than it seems from afar. Their students only turn into knowledgeable, versatile experts after weeks of intensive, guided learning. The work of a business trainer is tough, too. Effective, consistent service professionalism only emerges after hours of expert instruction, coaching, and guided practice.

There’s no way around the difficulties and hassles that excellent training involves, but it is truly worth all the time and trouble. A commitment to and understanding of proper training is a golden ticket in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Few businesses and business leaders show the doggedness needed to commit to, structure, and maintain the training needed to create and sustain a superb service staff. If you have that tenacity and vision, it will help your company lead its field.

The Passion for Training

Starting in the Middle Ages, master craftsmen would bring in young apprentices and teach them a craft—a process that took the better part of a decade. Nowadays it may seem anachronistic to emphasize lengthy, intensive training amid so much preoccu-pation with efficiency and speed. But it’s an important leadership responsibility to ensure proficiency, and the patient, deliberate skill transfer from master to apprentice has huge value. Great organizations understand that they must be ‘‘learning organizations’’: they learn from their customers, from their employees, and from their competitors. Great organizations are also ‘‘training organizations.’’ Otherwise, what will happen to all that organizational learning?

We recommend that you begin by developing a specific training curriculum (internally or in conjunction with a training organization) that reflects your particular business context. The details of your com-

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pany’s curriculum will depend on your industry, your company’s culture, and the expectations of your customer segment.

No matter what your business entails, we encourage you to focus on training employees in how to balance two priorities: the need to provide each customer with anticipatory service and the equally important need to respect the customer’s protective bubble. We sometimes refer to this as learning how to be bullish in a china shop. It’s hard to quantify this balance; mastering it comes with time and experience. But once it has been achieved, it leads to solid, quantifiable increases in customer loyalty.