When customer service staff have no control, they have full control.
The role of Customer Service/Frontline Manager means you have a big bucket of responsibilty. There can be days when making decisions seems like all you do, days when everyone seems to need you and days where there’s no time to get your work done.
If this is you, take a minute to say ‘well done’ - you are doing well but do you really want to keep going like this? Most don’t so keep reading…
Take a minute now to remember what it feels like to have no control at work. Remember your first job (or maybe your last job) when you didn’t know everything, you had to ask for help, ask for permission, wait for feedback, couldn’t try something new and had to interact with strangers (customers) all day and you never knew how they would behave?
The reason I asked you to reflect on this is that your frontline customer service staff may feel like that now.
It’s very common in a customer service or frontline role to have loads of people ‘telling’ you what to do and how to do it.
Manager/Supervisor/Team Leader who provides goals, tasks and deadlines
Customers who confirm what they want and how they want it, what you’re doing wrong and how someone else does it better
External bodies that provide rules and regulations… and keeps changing them
The general public who rant on social media or approach them out of work hours with their opinions and demands.
The well meaning friends and family who tell them to slow down or stop worrying.
Having a sense of control is a key to feeling valued at work.
Customer service staff who have no or very low control in their role, find it difficult to remain positive, to care about the business, to consistently provide excellent service or to simply smile.
What you have then is staff who don’t like their job, interacting directly with customers and that means they have control over how customers feel about the business - and the feeling won’t be great!
To give your customer service staff positive control and to improve their level of job satsifaction, it’s up to you.
Make time to review what they do and look for where you can hand over control. Here’s 2 examples
If your team process face to face customer transactions
Ask staff to tell you what would improve those interactions. I asked this question to a room of Library staff and the idea of free book marks with the library contact details was born. The bookmark was greatly appreciated by customers who didn’t have computers at home. 3 staff designed the book marks, 2 staff researched the printing and everyone gave them out and gained loads of compliments and a sense of control.
If your team are required to handle complaints
Ask staff to tell you what would improve those interactions. We ask this at many of our sessions and the majority of staff want 2 things:
Support from their managers to back them up when customers won’t back down,
Training on how to deal with the ‘aftershock’ of interacting with rude or demanding customers.
When customer service staff are encouraged to tell you what could make their days better, it confirms you respect they know what they need and they know the customers well - really well.
It also allows you to identify where you can lessen your load and you do this via delegation. Customer service staff who are encouraged to learn new things, try new ways, solve their own problems and share best practices have greater levels of job satsifaciton.
Customer service staff who have a sense of control over what they do and how they do it, provide better levels of service.
Everyone, in every role benefits from having some form of control but just like you, having all of the control can be overwhelming. Ease your load through delegation.