Only nine days behind schedule on wishing you a Happy New Year. "Having done that...". let's talk about 2011 and the opportunity in front of us.
At the end of December I had the privilege to watch one of our clients working through reviews. A laborious task for the Supervisor and really nerve wracking for the employee that receives it. What was fascinating is that the manager was doing a whole bunch of cutting and pasting of direct customer comments in to each review question. The supervisor had figured out that the employees were much more receptive to comments from customers than they were from the supervisor throughout the year. The year end review was not going to be any different. On average over 50% of the supervisors comments about the employees performance were directly from the customers.
Even more impressive was that when the supervisor directed the employees to areas of improvement for the coming year, they also targeted the customers to "watch and coach these areas". It sounded something like this.
"George it is clear from this past year that your biggest area of improvement needs to be improving your empathy with your customers- Customer One: George did a good job but I did not feel he really cared about me or my problem. He helped me but it did not seem like he really wanted to help. Customer Two: I had to repeat myself three times. Don't get me wrong, he heard me; I could just never get him to see my problem...
In 2011, George we are going to instruct the customers to look specifically for you to show empathy and express care and concern for their problems. We will also provide you with a review of material....
Customers actively involved in finding the problems, verifying the behavior and then part of changing the behavior. One more thing, the customers were not paid for this direct involvement. They did it because they care.
Almost like empathy....
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