It is pretty hard to expect great customer service from a staff of representatives that are less than happy with their surrounding work environment. Therefore, one of the first steps in creating a great customer service crew is to create and stimulate a happy customer service crew.
If employees are demoralized, frustrated, irritated, or generally disheartened with the company overall, you can expect that it will show in their attitude towards the customers. Frustrations among staff members can flow over into their work attitude and create frustrated customers, which can snowball into bad business. Staff must not only personally be at ease in general, but they must also be free of conflicts with the other employees they work with. In a post on Quality Digest, Ron Kaufman, author of Uplifting Service, writes, “Too often, organizations promise satisfaction to external customers and then allow internal politics to frustrate their employees’ good intentions to deliver. It’s important to remember that your customers aren’t the only ones who come through your organization’s door every day seeking quality service. Your co-workers and leaders also need to be served. If they’re not happy, it’s not likely they’ll deliver stellar service, and the same goes for you.”
Yes, employers need to work hard for increasing business through new and repeat customers, but they must also seek to keep employees motivated with the job. One key way to assist the employees in their motivation is to keep a close eye out for problem employees before they cause issues. Problem employees can cause all kinds of interpersonal strife in the staff, so it is important to identify and deal with them quickly. For example, I get weekly horror stories from my wife, who has a troublemaker in her crew, and the turmoil it causes the whole team and their work stress level.
A good, experienced hiring agent will have the skill to identify the right type of person up front, which will eliminate much of the problem, because when it comes to hiring, "People are not your most important asset, the RIGHT people are," says Jim Collins, author of From Good to Great (as quoted by Gregory P. Smith). Smith’s articles lists seven great keys to customer service success, and it is great to see that the employee concern is the first point on the list. I first learned of this concern back when my supervisor was hiring a new co-worker to work alongside me. I have never been involved in the hiring process at my company, so my feeling was “just hire the first person with the skills,” and I couldn’t understand why I kept seeing applicants come and go for interviews, but not one was hired. Apparently, they turned down many applicants just because they didn’t seem to fit our whole team structure, so it took almost a year for fill the position. My supervisor definitely had the whole office in mind when choosing the candidate, rather than filling the need with a skillset. That is a great idea when you work in small teams.
So, while the pressure is on for companies to compete for business, it is truly important that a key focus is made for employee and team concerns and morale. If supervisors pay more attention to the team structure, when the stress levels soar they can be more at ease knowing that having a group of people who are comfortable and at peace with each other, it will keep the job moving forward, and not spiraling out of control.
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