Naughty or Nice: How You Treat Your Employees is How They Treat Your Customers

So, this one has been in the works most of the year.  I have shared some of these thoughts in brief posts over the year but wanted to bring all these thoughts together in one place.

I want to make sure to first recognize Hal F. Rosenbluth and Diane McFerrin Peters for their book “The Customer Comes Second.”  Much of how I think of Customer Service/Customer Care begins and ends with the fundamental, basic principle behind this book.  I firmly believe, and have proven over my career in many roles working with many Fortune 500 and 100 companies, that the most important part of ensuring customer happiness, success, loyalty, is ensuring employee happiness, success, and loyalty.  I know this sounds simple, logical, like common sense, but unfortunately most companies either don’t understand this principle or simply ignore it.

One of the independent focus groups I have been conducting this year is with a group of employees who work for one of the largest distributors of goods in the world.  This distributor has multiple warehouses in the Boise area, one is East of Boise and is the “smaller” of the two, not small by any measure, but smaller.  The other is West of Boise and is massive.  The folks who work in the East speak extremely highly of their management, love working there, enjoy the environment, and describe it as “fun,” “loose,” “supportive.”  Some who work there have shared, “They just let us do our jobs and be playful at the same time,” and “Jeff B. doesn’t let any of his workers work too hard.”  The facility in the West does not take this approach with their employees at all.  The employees there describe their work environment as “tense,” “stressful,” “under the gun.”  They describe their management as “taskmasters,” “slave drivers,” and “micro-managers.”  None of this language is unique to this one location or company, however, it is odd to see two such facilities within twenty miles of one another with such very different approaches in leadership within the facilities.

So here is my question: which of these facilities do you think outperforms the other?  Which do you think is recognized by the company for being a top-performing center nationally?  I realize that the set-up for this gives away the punchline, but it is in fact the East facility where the employees feel supported by their management and where they feel they are allowed to be themselves and have fun as a team as long as they are getting their work done.  This facility is consistently recognized nationally for how efficient they are at what they do.

I also shared earlier in the year in a post that I have been conducting independent focus groups within the retail food industry.  These employees work for local, regional, and national/international pizza companies, as well as across the restaurant landscape in Boise, again, some local and regional restaurants, and some national/international chains.  The one question I have focused on is does your management feed you?  In the food industry, the simplest form of recognition an employer could use to reward their employees is to feed them.  I know this sounds like stating the incredibly obvious, but it is very true.  It is neither difficult nor expensive, for restaurants of all types to feed their employees.  Of the restaurants that do feed their employees, some restaurants will provide a fixed meal for the group as a whole prior to opening, some will allow employees to choose from certain items and some will not limit what employees order, just provide limits on quantity and/or timing.

So, unfortunately, when it comes to the retail food industry groups I spoke to regarding whether or not their employers fed them their answers fell into the 80/20 rule but in the negative.  More than eighty percent of these folks reported that their employers do not feed them during their shift at work.  Of those that fell in the minority, most, almost all, reported they were offered a discount ranging from twenty percent to fifty percent on one meal during their shift.  There was even one regional pizza company that had been offering fifty percent off on one pizza per shift but took that reward away claiming, “We are experiencing too much waste in food prep,” and therefore revoked their employee discount.  Here is another question for you, would you want one of these folks making your pizza?  Especially in the first week or two after their discount was revoked as a punishment.

It is simply incredible to me that in an industry where margins are typically in triple digits, as in one hundred and fifty to two hundred percent markup, why not throw your employees a few “scraps?”  Please keep this in mind the next time your waitperson seems a bit grumpy.  They may be “hangry!”

My last example comes from an area that impacts most everyone on the planet to some extent and for most, to a great extent, and that is in the world of mobile phones.  I am sitting in a coffee shop writing this, and I just looked up and scanned the room to discover that at least one person at every table is looking at their phone, and at several tables, EVERYONE is looking at their phones.  I often want to ask, and sometimes do, are they texting each other?  Yes, I can be an a—sometimes, but it is just a fact these days that most people are attached to their phones all day long every day, including while they drive, so customer service in this world is, to say the least, important.

I did a little experiment a couple of years ago that took most of that year.  I first moved from T-Mobile, a company I have never had any issues with and moved to Consumer Cellular.  After being with Consumer Cellular for a few months I moved to AT&T, to continue the experiment and to get a “free” fancy new phone.  I love the phone and use it, like most, all day long every day, and in my case, it doubles as my camera.  What I learned through this experience was somewhat eye-opening, and a bit surprising.  Consumer Cellular was fine.  Their coverage, although in theory they use existing towers, was not as good in some remote areas as T-Mobile.  I can only assume this has to do with their usage agreements for the towers with the big carriers, and while they always claim to be the best in the industry in customer service, and even push the fact that their call centers are one hundred percent “US based,” their customer service people I found to be very basic in servicing and very much “script” driven.  AT&T was not a good experience at all!!  I signed up at a local store and got my “free” new smartphone.  As it turned out the phone was not in the least free because the person in the store that wrote up the initial order made a mistake.  I called customer service on several occasions, eventually asking to speak with their “Executive Office.”  You are probably aware that when you ask to speak with someone in the Executive Office with a large company you do not speak with someone in their actual Executive Office, but rather someone staffed to a group that calls themselves “Executive Office.”  At some point along the way this became commonplace and I am sure at first some people believed they were speaking with someone with some clout within the company, but the reality is we are simply speaking with another customer service representative in a different department.  Anyway, what I discovered with AT&T is that their call centers are entirely, or almost entirely, “off-site.”  Their people read from scripts one hundred percent of the time, and they have no license whatsoever to fix issues.  Their executive office representatives are exactly the same, for the most part, and when I finally did get someone who seemed to understand the issue, which was rare, they would insist that this was a mistake in how the original order was written up in the store and therefore could not be fixed by Customer Service.  Would this not therefore mean that calling them Customer Service was a misnomer?  I did visit the store twice, and they of course blamed the issue on policy and said they had no ability to change or fix anything.

T-Mobile on the other hand, having a call center just outside Boise, is regionally based in the US for two-thirds of each day and is absolutely authorized to find solutions for their customers.  It is not that I have never had an issue with T-Mobile in my time with them, just that I have never had an issue that their Customer Service folks could not fix to my satisfaction, and from speaking with a few of the folks that work in their call centers in this area I have found the same is true of the environment they work hard to create as the environment of the East warehouse facility from the beginning of this article, have fun, work together, do your jobs and do them well, and let us know how we can support you in your role.  Some of the T-Mobile folks have said of working in the call center here as “I love my job,” “they treat us as though we are valued,” and “they expect us to find solutions for our customers.”  Having worked in call center management for my most recent employer, it is always refreshing when I hear call center employees speak of working with their customers to find solutions and not being worried about sticking to the letter of the law or getting off the phone quickly.

The above are just a few simple examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly of customer service in various industries.  I chose these examples out of many from my time building teams, and fixing teams, for clients over the years.  I could definitely tell you a dozen more stories of consulting clients where all we did was work with their existing teams to build/change communication, autonomy, and support such that people were allowed to do their jobs to the best of their ability and in most cases to be creative in doing so such that efficiency and productive were improved along the way, but regardless of which examples I choose the moral of the story will be exactly the same, if you have gone to the trouble of hiring good people that fit your Mission, Vision and especially your Core Values, a big if I know, then support them, encourage them, and give them the freedom to do their jobs to the best of their abilities together as a team, and then GET OUT OF THE WAY!!

It has been true for a very long time, if not for the history of time, that the carrot works better in the long run than the stick, but in today’s world of Generation X, Y, Z, or as I like to call them generation “ghost,” for the fact that today’s workforce will quite simply just disappear rather than stick it out and try to make a job work.  This workforce does not give notice, they do not care about your recommendation going forward, and in most cases won’t even text to let you know they are moving on.  I didn’t say text or call because in the world we live in today good luck getting anyone to actually pick up the phone and call.

The ultimate moral is that your employees really do treat your customers exactly as you treat them, or worse, and thus finding a way to create an environment where your employees feel valued, supported, even loved is the only reasonable course of action.  With the new year coming up, even though this may not be your company’s fiscal year, what a perfect time to change/tweak your approach and even ask your employees how you can work together to change what you do collectively to better serve your employees as a whole, and by default, better serve your customers.  What do you have to lose?

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!!