Send to KindleCustomer Service, Attitude, and Leadership
If you had been hovering over the store that day, you would have thought you were watching some sort of live video game. My wife and I were in a large store looking for a particular item. We had walked around a while with no luck so we decided to ask. The hunt was on! We moved from aisle to aisle in search of a store employee and finally, as we turned down the curtain aisle there he was! But he saw us and scurried over to the next aisle. Not to be deterred, we reached the end of the curtain aisle and turned towards the next aisle, sheets. There he was again, this time talking to another employee. They both saw us at the same time and scurried off in two different directions. This cat and mouse game continued until we decided to split up and approach the next aisle from both ends.
I’m not an expert in customer service although as a customer I know good and bad customer service when I see it. My expertise is in leadership development and I’m amazed at how seldom businesses connect those two concepts. One of the most important aspects of leadership development is understanding the needs and motivations of those being led. Quite simply, it’s very difficult to have good customer service when inept leaders do not understand these critical factors.
Now I’m not saying that managers are intentionally sabotaging customer service. In fact they are often the ones reciting the mantras they learned in the last training session. The problem is that a good bit of customer service is attitude. When employees are enduring bad, or at least unskilled leadership, it reflects in the attitude that is very evident to customers.
Bad leadership doesn’t necessarily mean a manager who is tyrannical monster, plotting ways to ruin worker’s lives. More commonly, bad leadership is simply untrained leadership resulting from the all-to-common practice of moving employees into supervisory positions for which they are not trained and have not developed the necessary skills. It’s interesting that we require specialized training for the worker who operates the forklift, but not for the person who is responsible for leading that forklift operator.
Our hunt for a store associate was successful that day. We cornered another one who, with a startled look on her face realized she had nowhere to run. The experience had an effect on how much money we spent in that store. How much better would our experience have been if those employees had been led by a manager who understood leadership and not just some platitudes about customer service?
