Transcripts

Paul Levesque:
I think the biggest difference is the culture of the organization. I refer to it as a flash point culture.

Paul Levesque, author of the book, Customer Service From The Inside Out Made Easy…

And I use that to describe a situation where employees are motivated, they're motivated to delight customers. So, employee motivation is producing customer satisfaction. That satisfaction is inspiring those customers to express their approval and that positive feedback, in turn, motivates the employees further. So you have like a closed loop feedback effect.

But that's not how most companies operate.

The traditional historical approach that hasn't worked over all these decades is that we have to train our employees or throw incentives at them, in other words we have to fix the employees, they're what's wrong, rather than fix the culture.

Interestingly Paul says when you go inside companies with excellent customer service…

What you discover again and again, they are not being given any special treatment in terms of wages, in terms of training of any kind. What they do give them instead is the ownership of customer experience. By which I mean, those employees are encouraged to voluntarily come up with innovative ideas and initiatives that will improve the customer experience and letting the employees bask in the feedback.

Tomorrow, how customers can get better customer service from any company- I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.