by Shaun Smith
Because of the casting approach and resource elasticity that is achieved through this programme we are able to build volume quickly, and whether we do it in the United States, the UK, in Holland or in France, we see consistency in the performance of our hotels in outranking others in service because of our people.
Hire for DNA not MBA
Hiring the right people for your culture is vital. Robert Stephens said, ‘I hire for the customer experience I want.’ We have a saying when we advise clients: ‘hire for DNA not MBA’. By this we mean find the people who fit your culture rather than the best qualified or most experienced candidate. You can train someone in what they don’t know but it is much harder to get them to behave in a way that is alien to their personality.
We were speaking at a large financial services conference and asked the delegates to raise their hands if they provided customer service training to their people. All the hands went up. We then asked them to keep their hands raised if they felt their organization delivered a distinctive customer experience. Almost all of the hands were lowered. The point is that most organizations deliver generic service training, often delivered by the same training consultancies. No surprise, then, that the experience the customer gets is at best generic. When we work with clients we design what we call ‘Branded Customer Experience Training’. In other words, training that has the purpose, brand promise and customer experience woven throughout it like a red thread.
Engage and inspire your people to deliver your customer experience ‘on purpose’ through branded experience training
Vanessa Hamilton has worked with Smith+co for 15 years and has designed branded experience training for many of the world’s leading brands and so she has a definite point of view on what works and what doesn’t.
After 15 years in the customer experience business, there is still one sentence that makes me want to run for the hills: ‘We need a service excellence programme for our front-line staff.’ You don’t! You’ve probably implemented many perfectly good ‘service excellence’ programmes in the past. Any team member who has been in your company longer than 10 years might recall three or more of them. What does that tell you about how well they have stuck? About the impact they had? And about the difference they have made to your business?
That’s because generic service training doesn’t connect your people to your brand. It doesn’t help them to understand what your brand stands for – and why that matters. It doesn’t help them to explore how they can really bring your brand to life for customers through their actions and behaviours.
If you want your people to deliver a meaningful and valuable experience for your customers – one that differentiates your brand from your competitors and drives customer loyalty – you have to create a branded experience for them too. That starts with being intentional in connecting your people with your brand purpose. At the heart of every brand is a compelling story that people want to be part of. That’s why every customer experience communication or training that you deliver should be able to answer – and keep answering – these three questions:
Why is this important?
How will it benefit our company and me?
What do I need to do additionally or differently in my role?
Keeping these questions in mind throughout your training design process ensures everyone in your organization hears a clear, simple and joined-up message, and knows where and how they can play a valuable part in your brand’s evolving story.
If you want to create a differentiated experience, create differentiated training. Our approach to branded experience training is that it:
Starts with ensuring your people understand, in depth, what your target customers expect and the value from your brand, what your brand promises to customers about the experience they can expect and what this requires from the people who deliver it.
Engages your front-line teams in defining and designing the skills and knowledge needed to deliver your brand – they are closest to the customer in every sense and best placed to know what exactly your customers want. If new behaviours are to stick and become ‘how we do things here’, your people need to have a voice and a role in defining them.
Is training created with people for people – not training done to people. Branded experience training is not about creating scripts for your people or prescribing exact behaviours for every single customer interaction. It is about freedom within a framework. Being ‘tight’ on what your brand stands for, and the customer experience you wish to create, but ‘loose’ in execution. It is about trusting individual staff members to use their initiative and do what it takes to satisfy each individual customer.
Involves managers in ‘owning’ brand delivery and sustaining success. Managers – not HR and not your training team – are ultimately accountable for the customer experience that is delivered in their shop, branch, bank, site, hotel etc. Therefore, they are responsible for creating the workplace conditions for success through their leadership attitude and behaviours.
Links recruitment, performance management and measurement directly to the customer experience you want to deliver – so you are hiring, developing, measuring and recognizing people who live your brand; and you’re doing so ‘on purpose’.
This last item is a particular sticking point for many companies. They want their people to be welcoming to customers, to take time to understand their needs, to add value to customers through advice and recommendation and to make them feel positively about your company and what it stands for… but they still want to target and measure them on units per transaction (UPT), average transaction value (ATV), mix, call processing etc.
Purposeful brands approach this differently. They hire for attitude, train for skill and motivate for performance. I always remember a wonderful phrase that one of our clients used to describe their philosophy for hiring store associates: ‘We want people with a bit of the barmaid about them!’ This is referring to the ability of bar staff generally to make customers feel warmly welcomed into a convivial environment and to talk with them with a natural ease.
Purposeful brands, then, empower their people with the skills, information, authority and time to serve the customer well and then let them prove they can! When you demonstrate that you trust people – and equip and support them to do their jobs – they usually surprise you by just how much they can do.
What you get is real commitment to, and ownership of, the customer experience – and customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitable growth flow from that.
As Vanessa says, purposeful brands hire for attitude, train for skill and motivate for performance. We have discussed hiring and training so let’s now turn to motivating.
Motivation is a poorly understood concept
One of our favourite TedTalks is Dan Pink’s brilliant 18-minute speech, ‘The Puzzle of Motivation’.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
Dan Pink makes the point that the things that most organizations believe motivate high performance are extrinsic or contingent rewards, incentives, bonuses etc. It turns out that they are much less powerful than we think. To really motivate high performance we need to use intrinsic rewards, things that are driven more by the satisfaction of the task itself. The three most powerful elements are: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is the desire to direct our own actions; mastery is the desire to become better at what we do and purpose is doing whatever it is because it matters.
There is no greater proof of this than to motivate people to go to extraordinary lengths to provide an incredible customer experience for no pay at all. But that is exactly what Linda Moir did as Director of Spectator Services for the London 2012 Olympic Games. The London Olympics were successful on so many fronts but one of the things most often referred to were the amazing ‘games makers’, that army of cheerful volunteers who created such a welcoming and distinctive experience. Linda w
as formerly Director of Customer Experience for Virgin Atlantic and so has customer experience in her blood, but how was she to create that kind of experience when the service providers were a group of unpaid and unskilled amateurs?
Motivating the greatest team on earth
The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games saw one of the largest peacetime deployments of people the world has seen, from the front-of-house team who created the conditions for the athletes to perform to the legions of teams who worked away from the action ensuring that the London Tube ran smoothly. Whilst years in the planning, the Olympics were only fully operational for just over three weeks so there was little time for trial and error or for first-day problems. Teams simply had to come together across functions, organizations and countries to deliver the greatest show on earth, knowing that an estimated audience of 900 million people worldwide would be tuning in.
So how did this army of about 250,000 people, including around 70,000 volunteers, come together to be the games makers that made the London games one of the most iconic and memorable in history? The Spectator Services Team alone, who hosted over 9 million spectators at 36 competition venues, comprised 15,000 volunteers and 6,000 contracted safety stewards. Whilst the numbers were vast, the principles underlying the entire games maker experience were the same simple principles that leading service organizations apply to encourage passion and advocacy amongst their teams. Whilst I had never managed volunteers I had managed people before and took some advice from the team who hosted the Sydney Olympics and Paralympics of 2000. The Sydney team proudly talked about their high levels of volunteer engagement and retention. Our London games volunteers were at the heart of our operation so their motivation – and retaining them for the full length of the games – was a very high priority. The Sydney team said there were three simple golden rules to volunteer engagement and these ‘rules’ apply as much in the commercial world as in the games. Every step of the volunteer journey was mapped with the same care as the customer’s journey:
Rule 1 – keep people busyOur London volunteers made extraordinary efforts to get to their venues in time for the early starts and late finishes that were required. Many of them stayed with friends, camped or took a multitude of night buses to get there on time. Having made such Herculean efforts we made sure in the spectator services team that they were fully utilized. Not having enough to do is frankly boring and makes the day go slowly. So we looked carefully at our numbers and made sure we didn’t overstaff.
Rule 2 – keep people rotatedWe made the strategic choice to train our volunteers on a wide variety of tasks so that we could make sure that they had a varied and interesting experience. The spectator services team all commented that they really enjoyed the variety and the learning that the broad job roles offered. We made sure that each venue had a staffing manager whose job was to make sure the games makers had a rich and rewarding experience. One of the greatest lessons for me was never to underestimate the capacity and appetite of people from every background to learn. It was inspiring to see people start nervously then grow and develop and have fun with our customers.
Rule 3 – recognize people and their needsPrevious games had given their volunteers small ‘shift gifts’ as tokens of recognition. London also awarded small pin badges to games makers – bronze for their first shift, silver for half their shifts then gold when they completed all their rostered shifts. The usually reserved Brits wore their pins with pride and these are still treasured today. These ‘low-cost high-value’ gifts represented being part of a once-in-a-lifetime event and could be seen worn by the whole London team including the armed forces, the police, Transport for London staff as well as the games makers. However, these gifts alone were not the key in building real engagement; that came from the ‘intrinsic’ reward: the emotional connections that made this diverse group of people proud to be games makers. The behaviour of the front-line leaders was crucial in building this. All leaders from the most senior manager at the venue to the volunteer team leader were briefed on the style of leadership that was based on recognition. Tasks had to be completed but part of the leader’s day job was to make sure they knew their teams by name, regularly stopped and thanked them for their contribution and asked them for their observations on what could be done better. This is what games makers still talk about today, how they felt a valued part of the team.
At the closing ceremony when Seb Coe thanked the games makers the audience spontaneously stood and cheered non-stop for over 10 minutes – the ultimate emotional recognition.
Image 7.1 The London 2012 closing ceremony
How did they know what to do?
I am often asked how we got the games makers to behave in a way that outperformed everyone’s expectations, probably including their own. The answer again is simple: we gave the volunteers as much confidence as possible by training them in the tasks they would be asked to perform, then described a vision of ‘hosting’ our games in a way that gave them huge scope to bring their personalities to work and have fun with our 9 million spectators. By defining the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ but not the ‘how’, each games maker brought their own ideas to the games as to how to create memories for visitors from around the world. Spontaneous actions such as singing songs, making up rap rhymes, high-fiving the kids, creating finish lines with toilet paper for children’s running races – none of these were in any training manual. This came from a truly engaged team who just knew what was the right thing to do to make sure everyone had a fun and memorable day.
Too often service organizations try to control every aspect of the relationship with customers by over-scripting every detailed interaction. This takes all spontaneity and humanity away from the people who are delivering the experience, as well as delivering a robotic experience for customers.
I am enormously proud of the London games makers who smashed the belief that British people can’t deliver brilliant and memorable customer service.
It is evident from Linda’s example that autonomy, mastery and purpose were front and centre in the philosophy used to manage the games makers. She also used the principle of ‘loose/tight’ to allow the games makers the freedom to behave in a way that allowed their personalities to communicate to the spectators. The result was an unprecedented standing ovation lasting over 10 minutes. Not all customer experiences are quite as emotional or measured in such a dramatic way. But measured they must be.
Autonomy, mastery and purpose are also very evident in our next example. Timpson is a family-owned business that was founded in Manchester, England in 1865 to make and repair boots. It is now run by the fifth generation of the family. It is not high-tech like Zappos; in fact it is so anti-tech that the chairman dumped all of their expensive electronic point of sale (EPOS) systems in a skip (‘dumpster’ to American readers). Nor is it glamorous like the Olympics with the focus on celebrity athletes. It has a policy of recruiting from prisons, but it exhibits many of the same characteristics we have observed in our purposeful brands. Yet whereas Zappos starts with the customer and works back, Timpson starts with the employee.
Timpson
Timpson is a family-owned, fiercely independent and proudly maverick high-street retailer. For over 100 years, the company has made, sold or repaired shoes. In the mid-1980s, as trainers started coming onto the market, the shoe-repair business declined by 25 per cent because people don’t repair trainers. That was having a big hit on its profitability so it undertook a strategic review and asked how it could use its small but conveniently located shops with their skilled employees to meet an unmet customer need. The answer was cutting keys. In 1986 that service was worth about £500,000; it is now worth about £40 million. Today, Timpson offers shoe repair, key cutting, engraving, photo processing and watch repairs through its 1,350 stores. All of these are convenience-based services that are low cost but high value for customers and performed by well-trained, customer-focused people.
Timpson’s purpo
se is to provide ‘great service by great people’ and it is renowned for its ‘upside-down management’ philosophy that pushes as much control as possible to the people running the shops. It champions a culture in which store managers set prices, order the stock and have huge scope to provide excellent customer service. They have created a level of employee engagement that has made Timpson one of the best companies to work for again and again – placed in the Top 10 of the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For awards every year they have entered.
Timpson is also renowned for its philanthropy and has aligned the business’s drive for profitability and excellence with its social mission. It is the UK’s most active recruiter of people from prison. At first sight this seems a strange policy for a customer-centric organization that places as much power as possible in the hands of its people. But as we shall see, this is all part of the DNA.
Given that Timpson is about upside-down management, we decided we would start the case study with one of the most important people in the business: one of the branch managers, and leave the chairman until last, which is exactly the way he would wish it.
Michael Carter – Timpson shop manager, Barnes High Street
I’ve worked in total around 25 years for Timpson. It’s a very special company. Everything is done in front of the customer. I say that this shop is my theatre, I am the actor and my customers are the audience. The shoe repairs, the watch repairs, key cutting are all done in the front of my store – there’s no back space out of sight of the customers where things get done.