Staff is the mechanism that makes the organisation function, flourish and pay dividends, says Mario Pretorius in this latest tip. It is Staff that converts reluctance to joy in customer interactions. The confidence you inspire in backing your team – even when the call is down to 50/50 – is worth a handful of customers. If it means losing a client in the process – pay the price. GK
You have many customers and infinitely more potential ones but much less staff. The STAFF is King; choose THEIR side when in doubt.
This sounds like heresy in the age where ‘Customer is King!’ is repeated as often as the 1940’s Kellogg’s ploy of “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day’
Here’s my thinking, and I hope you agree.
We have 16 000 customers and less than a hundred staff serving them. In another business we have 350 staff serving 85 customers in the mining sector.
We field three types of calls from customers: account queries, technical difficulties and information requested. Sometimes this translates into ‘get me the CEO, I need to vent my anger’.
I carefully choose and deservedly pay a number of good people to leave that joyful place called home every weekday and spend all daylight hours incarcerated sitting down and staring at a screen, a pile of papers, and facing and a ringing phone.
There is a special bond between us, and they are the mechanism for the organisation to function, flourish and pay dividends to all participating in it. It is a biomass of skills, expertise, and smiles; a repository of great wisdom, accumulating experiences daily and transmuting reluctance to joy in our customer interactions.
There are only a selected few that will ever fit in and make a career with either TeleMasters, SperoSens or the other businesses I am involved in.
Customers on the other hand, are numerous. We choose them and invite them to join our gallery of symbiotic collaborators, but with the unwavering proviso: life is too short to deal with bad people. Scream at my staff once, and I will personally fire a customer at CEO level. Insult my people and you will find yourself at the receiving end of a crimen injuria case, never mind who is right or wrong.
In any 50/50 situation, I choose the side of my staff, and they know it. I make marginal calls to their benefit and will jettison a client if needs be. We are in the business of acquiring business and our people deal with their people; their people are a reflection of their business ethos and, if the signs on a lower level are not good, then we can do without nasty surprises later on.
Mistakes occur. Honesty and factual correctness is needed and your decision must be unemotional – and binding. Be particularly alert to patterns. If the same person on your side may have a second and third scrap with a customer and then plead blamelessness, you can re-evaluate his worth. Still, the confidence you inspire in backing your team is worth a handful of customers.
This tip is an extract from the manuscript of “The Unconventional CEO: Common sense outside of conventional Management thinking” (by Mario Pretorius).
