We've all seen the story.
The one where someone has gone out of their way to deliver an extraordinary service to a customer. My personal favourite is the RAC patrolman who stripped to his underwear before wading into waist high flood water in order to rescue three cars and their drivers. None of the drivers was even an RAC member - which is an even bigger testament to how wonderful this guy's behaviour was.
Most organisations have promoted stories of individual employees doing extraordinary things. They generally do it for three reasons.
- To publicly recognise exceptional service
- As marketing material for their customers so that they can shout about just how customer focused they really are
- In order to try and create internal tension so that other employees who may not perform to such a high standard can see real examples of the kinds of behaviour that the organisation would like to see them deliver.
The first reason is great. So long as the employee is happy for his or her actions to be made public then it's absolutely the right thing to do.
The other reasons are less convincing.
So your organisation (which may employ thousands of people) occasionally finds an extraordinary example of service. Is that really so unusual? And even more importantly, is it representative of what actually happens for the vast majority of interactions customers have with your company. Individual examples of what Jane did for this customer or what Jo did for that customer are almost certainly not representative. Even the most inept organisations probably manage to delight some customers some of the time.
The chances of the bulk of your staff changing their day to day customer behaviour is very low. It's much more likely that they'll just smile, shake their heads, and then get on with doing things the way they were doing them before they heard about the story.
A much more powerful and change driving approach might be to:
- Recognise and reward the individual act of customer service heroism at a public level
- Publicise it if the people involved have no objection (and in practical terms they may have no choice if the customers involved drive the publicity).
- Study and analyse the customer experience in order to identify the key capabilities that made it happen in the way that it did. Often the nature of the person involved and their personal strengths is a key driver of this.
- Recruit and nurture these capabilities in order to ensure that similar experiences happen more frequently. This is likely to require a major shift in thinking and approach to people recruitment, selection, training and management.
- Fix things that get in the way of employees being able to act heroically such as systems and processes.
- Improve your organisations ability to learn and recycle that learning into action which drives continuous improvement.
This is a long road to take - but it will help make sure that examples of heroism become more frequent and ultimately a core part of how your organisation does business. Imagine the goodwill that this will create for you. I bet that the three drivers rescued by Dave the RAC man are more likely to join the RAC now. And they'll tell their friends and family about it.
