Employees\u2019 actions, including expressing themselves face-to-face and through digital means, directly and indirectly impact much of what we understand about customer experience-based emotion and memory, leading to downstream behavior. For example, even in this age of greater customer self-service, each customer service representative (CSR) across the United States still handles an average of over 2,000 customer interactions each week. If CSRs are not aligned with the customer management strategy, and delivering value in a timely and as expected manner \u2014 indeed, are not directly involved with creating and executing the strategy \u2014 it can represent thousands of opportunities to put customers at risk or lose them.
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These centers of customer interaction now represent the principal touch-point with customers; and beyond technology, they have the capability to generate and manage a continuous flow of customer information, and to increase customer loyalty<\/a> and advocacy behavior. Getting the most out of employees in customer contact centers, and anyone else in the organization with front line customer contact responsibilities, will require change. In many companies, this means significant, sometimes wrenching change to achieve chronos and kairos.<\/p>\n For customer management and high-quality experience and value delivery to be optimized, one of the changes that companies will have to institute is to start focusing on people, all of the employees within the enterprise. Hal Rosenbluth, former CEO of the highly successful, multibillion-dollar travel management company, Rosenbluth International (which was merged with American Express Travel Related Services several years ago), said in his book,The Customer Comes Second: \u201cCompanies are only fooling themselves when they believe that \u201cThe Customer Comes First.\u201d People do not inherently put the customer first, and they certainly don\u2019t do it because their employer expects it. We\u2019re not saying choose your people over your customers. We\u2019re saying focus on your people because of your customers. That way, everybody wins.\u201d Over the years, I\u2019ve applied this quote to identify core elements of \u201cpeople first\u201d employee experience and creating ambassadorial employee behavior. What Rosenbluth said holds up two decades after first being published.<\/p>\n Tremendous investments have been made on technological innovations \u2014 IVR systems, call routing, multi-media integration and the like \u2014 yet investment in people, and processes to support them, has been stagnant, lagging behind other efforts. To deliver on the promise technology offers in customer relationships, organizations need to prioritize staff performance. People have to be trained in what to do and when to do it (chronos and kairos), provided with the tools and empowerment to deliver value, given feedback about how they\u2019re doing and rewarded if they are doing well.<\/p>\n Tom Peters has said that, in the future: \u201cMost work will be done by project teams. The \u02dcaverage\u2019 team will consist of various people from various \u02dcorganizations\u2019 with various skills. Networks of bits and pieces of companies will come together to exploit a market opportunity.\u201d Such can certainly be the case with customer loyalty; service and relationships; and customer recovery programs. There are several advantages to networked, team-based structures as opposed to traditional hierarchies as companies strive to create value for customers. They include better, more quickly shared information; greater staff decision agility, initiative and empowerment (kairos); faster response time (chromos); and greater customer contact, as well as:<\/p>\n \u2013 Flattened, matrix-based organizational structures for greater efficiency Creating a chronos and kairos culture within the organization that nurtures loyalty, commitment, advocacy and productivity from the moment the new hire walks through the door and throughout the life cycle of the employee will go a long way to sustaining customer loyalty behavior. The good news is that employees, particularly those in customer service, seek trust and trustworthiness; and they desire to be active contributors to that effort.<\/p>\n You Also Might Like…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Republished with permission from CustomerThink.com<\/a><\/p>\n![\"free](\"http:\/\/customerthink.com\/files2\/images\/join_customerthink_cx101.png\")
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\n\u2013 A minimization of non-value-added functional activities and better use of staff time and talent
\n\u2013 Individual ownership of performance, especially around customer experience and value delivery
\n\u2013 A greater opportunity for self-management (enablement and empowerment) and a wider scope of work in each job
\n\u2013 A linkage between performance objectives\u2014and individual and team performance\u2014to customer experience and loyalty behavior
\n\u2013 More targeted employee training and skill development<\/p>\n
![\"michael](\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Michael-lovwenstein.jpg\" "\\"Michael")
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