Guest Blog: Frontline Employees Are Expendable
April 15, 2008
Today, a guest post from one of our board members, Mel Kleiman. We’ve written before about the increasing trend toward replacing customer service professionals with self service options. Mel muses here where that path leads. A modest proposal, a la Jonathan Swift…
Unless your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or point of difference is Exceptional Customer Service (like Nordstrom, BMW, Ritz Carlton, and the Container Store), there’s no reason to sweat it when you lose frontline employees. Most likely, they were not that good anyway because, truth be told, you haven’t invested a lot of money in your hourly hires and even the training you provided, if any, didn’t cost much. In fact, their replacements will probably be just as good and may be even better than those you lose. New employees are excited about their new jobs and will probably have a better attitude and try harder - at least for the first three-to-six months. On top of this, employee turnover will probably reduce your labor costs because you won’t have to fund any benefit programs for a while. And there’s no need to worry if the new hire doesn’t know very much because the customers don’t expect them to know much when customer service is not your USP. You may even want to have new people wear a button that says: “I’m new. Please help me help you.”
Customers are expecting less and putting up with more in large part because automation has taken a lot of the service out of customer service. Voice mail and automatic attendants have eliminated the need for most phone operators and receptionists. Voice recognition software has reached the stage that it can direct your customer to the proper self-service option or you can send them to your website to look up the answer for themselves. Pay at the pump, self service gas has replaced the need for station attendants. And how about self-service checkout at grocery and retail outlets? Then we have touch screen ordering, self-service check in when you travel - not only with the airlines, but also for your hotel room. (If they could only get you to make your own bed!) These self-service options are often faster and the machine always says “thank you.” Production jobs are being performed by robots and no one does repair work any longer because we don’t get things fixed any longer, we just replace them.
The list could go on and on. Today, a few great workers can do as much as what a lot of average workers used to do. Just remember that those few workers better be great because by the time your customer gets to talk to or deal with a real human being, he or she is going to be so mad and frustrated that it will take a Herculean effort to defuse the situation and keep them from going to the competition. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says by 2010 we are going to be more than 10,000,000 workers short in this country. Don’t believe them. In 2000, they said by 2007 we would be 5,000,000 workers short and we still have about 4.6% unemployment in this country because they did not factor in the jobs that technology would replace.
Things have come full circle since the start of the Industrial Revolution and, in today’s world, frontline workers are once again replaceable cogs in a giant wheel.
Mel Kleiman CSp President of Humetrics.
Back to the Future
March 23, 2008
Last Wednesday, I attended an all day seminar hosted by IDC, a technology oriented analyst firm. The seminar was focused on topics that those of us who work for high technology firms care about; i.e. what’s the next big thing that our firms should capitalize on in order to continue to thrive. I attended sessions on Software as a Service (not so new), Software Appliances (still pretty new), Social Networking (kind of new), Innovation (not new at all), and a session on “The New Customer”.
It’s this last topic that I find fascinating - mostly because the attributes of “the new customer” seem pretty darned similar to the attributes of the majority of the customers I’ve served in 26 years of working for high technology companies. Specifically, customers purchasing high dollar technology solutions want to know that once the implementation is done, the solution they bought actually achieves the outcome they were shopping for. Sometimes that’s true business transformation, often it’s cost savings, but in all cases there is a project sponsor on the hook to find the right solution and make sure it works for the business. During and after the sales process, that project sponsor wants to talk to people who understand their business and the technology. They don’t want their relationship “managed”, they want the straight scoop they need to ensure they choose the right tools and partner to get the job done. People who’ve taken the risk to introduce a vendor’s solution into their organization want that vendor to be standing by their side as a partner who shares in solving the hard problems that inevitably accompany change.
The closing speaker at this conference was Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, and author of “The Ten Faces of Innovation”. While there are ten faces in his framework, he focused on “The Anthropologist” as the most important. His point was that organizations can’t truly service a customer’s needs, and definitely won’t discover new markets around unmet needs, unless they do the field work to observe the problems firsthand. He was a great speaker, and definitely a hit with an audience of high techies who love to be associated with the next big thing, but are often frustrated that their firms aren’t willing to take more chances when it comes to innovation.
In a related blog post last week, Bob Sutton talks about risk taking as key to innovation. Ironically, in many organizations risk taking isn’t as encouraged as it should be to drive innovation, yet the implicit risk associated with a failure to focus on ongoing customer success is rampant. What’s been your experience with the technology vendors who are important to your success at work?
Punching in at the Ritz Carlton
January 21, 2008
In a new article we’ve published, Are Hourly Workers Professionals?, David Creelman explores the qualities that differentiate professionals who happen to be paid by the hour from those who are merely punching the clock to earn a living. In his article, he talks about duration in the job, content that requires expertise, and a feeling of pride in the job as the key attributes of an hourly professional worker.
“OK”, you say, “I get how that might work for nurses, technicians and other skilled professions. But how about store clerks, janitors, and other relatively lower skilled jobs?” David cites examples from just these kinds of jobs in his article. While several of his examples are drawn from outside of the United States, we can see recent examples here where companies have ignored the professionalism of their front line staff to their financial detriment. Circuit City and Best Buy have been in the news lately, with the latter’s superior results frequently linked to its investments in its employees and customer service.
Check out the article and let us know of your experiences with front line professionals who’ve won your business and your loyalty.
I Scan, Therefore I am… the Cashier
December 2, 2007
In today’s New York Times, there’s a short article on online shopping (New Tradition: Eat the Turkey, Then Go Online) that says that Thanksgiving Day itself (vs. Black Friday) has been the busiest online retail shopping day of the holiday season for the last four years. According to the US Department of Commerce, e-commerce sales in the third quarter of 2007 accounted for 3.4% of total retail sales - still a small proportion of total retail sales, but roughly triple the rate of online purchases from 5 years ago.
Today was my first experience with Easy Shop - a new service from Stop & Shop wherein you use a handheld barcode scanner to scan your items as you walk around the store. At the self checkout line, you communicate your purchases via a single barcode swipe vs. scanning each item individually at the checkout. You bag your own groceries. You don’t have to interact with store personnel at all if you don’t want to.
In days not so long gone past, going to the market(place) was a social activity. You met your neighbors, caught up on the news, and supported local businesses with your trade. These businesses were owned by your neighbors, and supporting them strengthened your community. I live in the smallest town in Massachusetts - Nahant. There are no big box stores in this 1 square mile peninsular community. There are small locally owned businesses where the owner knows your name, and will trust you to come back later to pay back the couple of bucks you were short when you ran into the store.
With a full time job, a long commute, and multiple community and philanthropic commitments, my time is precious, and I do much of my household shopping on the Internet. Like lots of people worldwide, I appreciate the convenience and time savings, even if it means paying a premium for shipping. None of those online businesses, however, are ever going to spot me $5 when I need milk and have no cash.
When Black Friday Comes…
November 15, 2007
OK - I borrowed the title from a Steely Dan song from one of my favorite albums (link provided for those born after 1970). The song refers to a few cataclysmic events. For retailers, it refers to the day after Thanksgiving - when the holiday shopping begins in earnest, and retailers’ financial fates are in the hands of the consumers. Retailers are worried this holiday season as the mortgage market does the mambo, oil hits $100 per barrel, and the average consumer may be inclined to limit the holiday budget while waiting out the storm.
In partnership with Retail Systems Research, we’ve recently concluded a survey of major retailers entitled “The State of Retail Workforce Management”. You can download the full text of the survey from their website. This research is especially timely as it highlights the balancing act retailers need to achieve between customer service and expense management. From the Research section of this site, you can download “Customer Centricity’s Impact on the Workforce”, by Nikki Baird, Managing Partner at RSR Research. This article summarizes the survey findings and describes how management practices for the retail workforce and the tools used to manage the workforce must change if retailers are to survive in a customer-centric environment.
Among the principle findings of the survey is that while retailers almost universally cite their workforce, and specifically their customer facing workforce, as their most important asset, many still treat their workers as a means to an end vs. a strategic asset. There are some exceptions out there. In his blog HRCleanUp, my friend Jay Hargis cites customer service leaders like Starbucks and In-N-Out Burger that offer their employees benefits and seem to reap the rewards in employee and customer loyalty. A recent Boston Globe story indicates that some retailers are rethinking the marathon hours for their employees, and foregoing 5 am opening times in favor of having well rested employees who they believe will produce a better result for them.
I’d love to hear from you about retailers you think are doing a great job balancing employee satisfaction with business results. Happy shopping!
Not everything that happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas…
November 7, 2007
I’ve spent the last 5 days in Las Vegas attending KronosWorks. Kronos, our sponsor, had close to 2000 attendees at the conference - customers, press and analysts, and Kronos employees. Although I’m not typically a fan of Las Vegas, I had many “aha” moments this week that I’d like to share. Here are my top ten from this over-the-top city in the desert.
- Customer community building is king for any company. For technology companies like Kronos, creating opportunities for customers to interact with each other is incredibly powerful as users share both their successes and their failures with each other. Companies can’t throw a big party like KronosWorks every day, but they should be relentless in their pursuit of the customer point of view throughout the year.
- I’ve written a few times about customer service and customer retention in this blog. As an employee, there is nothing like seeing a couple thousand of your loyal customers together in one place to make you feel proud of your contribution to making that happen and to energize you to find more reasons for those customers to feel that loyalty. One of Kronos’ top sales reps told me he’d never been to the conference before, and that the opening day of the conference was one of his proudest days at Kronos, as he looked across the huge crowd.
- Daniel Pink’s tip on the best interview question - Are you lucky? Those who anwer yes tend to be collaborative, creative, and successful at work.
- Marcus Buckingham’s speech about the central fallacy of performance evaluations was intriguing. He talked about the power of focusing on developing employees’ strengths and leveraging them - vs. focusing performance conversations on what employees need to “fix” about themselves. He didn’t imply that managers should ignore ineffective behavior, but rather find ways to help themselves and their employees to maximize the frequency that they can be their most effective at work by identifying individual strengths and leveraging the knowledge in individual and team assignments.
- In a follow on meeting with about 35 executive attendees at the Workforce Institute Executive Seminar, Marcus led an equally compelling conversation about the behaviors that make for effective leadership. His definition: the purpose of a leader is to rally people to a better future. He talked not only about the importance of providing a clear vision of the future, but specifically about the need to make that vision vivid through storytelling and picking the right heroes in the organizational culture.
- Former Navy Commander Michael Abrashoff spoke about the importance of harnessing the wisdom of the team. I had read a profile on him in Fast Company when it was published in 1999. He is notable for having transformed the ship under his command from the worst to the best in the Navy at that time. He has subsequently retired from the Navy and is a well known author and speaker. He attributes his success to his focus on demonstrating respect for his sailors - not just through common courtesy, but by actively investing in their development and proactively seeking their advice on how to improve the command. His story about rusty bolts alone was worth the price of admission.
- Gary Heil of the Center for Innovative Leadership spoke to the Workforce Institute event attendees about strategies for driving change in their organizations. One of the interesting ideas he talked about was the notion that many leaders never really get comfortable with the change they say they want to achieve in their organizations. If leaders aren’t committed to leaving their own comfort zones, it’s unlikely they’ll inspire others to do so.
- Heil also talked about the importance of the impact of the environment on in supporting the change you seek. The specific environmental factors he encouraged us to think about were:
- Having a cause worth committing to
- Providing people with an opportunity to learn and grow
- Giving people the responsibility to a make a meaningful contribution
- Enabling a culture of mutual support and friendship
- Ensuring that structures (pay, benefits, opportunities) are fair and equitable
- I loved this quote from Heil - “People without information can’t take responsibility”. Business intelligence and business analytics are one of those topics that can seem arcane or obscure until you finally realize that you’re flying blind as you make risky and expensive decisions.
- Last, but certainly not least, I was reminded again about how lucky I am to have such a great team of colleagues at Kronos. As is true in all organizations, there are plenty of daily obstacles to overcome to drive results. Great outcomes like KronosWorks are the payoff for a lot of hard work. Even more important is the great esprit de corps that pervaded the last five days. Hats off, fellow Kronites! Let’s do it again tomorrow….
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