Serve those who serve your customers

It is all about communications, probably now more than ever. The Internet and mass media have opened up a whole new world of choices for our customers and potential customers, and it is up to us to offer them the best deal, not just in terms of price, but the best deal in terms of the service we provide. So let us ask ourselves a couple of questions to see if we are doing all we can to secure the business.

Are the interpersonal relations in your company supportive? Do we treat those who work for us in the same way as we would like them to treat our customers?

Ultimately, better workplace bonding equates to better customer relations. This is a known fact. Those companies that have a positive corporate culture will always prosper over those that do not. Much is spoken about the creation of a corporate culture. But how many of us really know what corporate culture means, and how this impacts us and our customers? Well, in the simplest terms, corporate culture is a set of shared beliefs and values in an organization that guide the behavior of its members positively. Words like mutual respect, openness, accountability and reliability are all associated with corporate culture. Are these words used much in your organization?

Many years ago, a man called Mischel conducted a long-term study that involved children as young as three years old. He followed and charted their progress until they were in their twenties. Mischel discovered that IQ only made up about 20 percent of the factors that predict success. The other 80 percent was emotional intelligence or EQ, short for Emotional Quotient. Mischel proved that by increasing education, you invariably increase the intellect, but through learning from experiences with people, you increase your emotional intelligence.

To break all this down, EQ is basically the ability to regulate moods, control responses, recognize emotion in others and respond appropriately, whereas IQ is verbal comprehension, word fluency, numbers and memory. Hopefully, we have employed people who have the requisite verbal and numeracy skills to do the job. But if you really think about it, how many have EQ?

Helping those we employ to learn and become more empathic with our customers is something we need to do. Sending them off to the annual customer care training course is also not the complete answer. We need to create the right work environment. Quite often, our staffers believe that customer service is just being "nice," whereas being nice is really just a starting point. Many companies also seem to have no measurement for customer retention. It is hard to quantify anything if you cannot measure it, and if you cannot measure your successes and failures, how can anyone learn? There also seems to be too much focus on products and little on the customer. Finding out who your customers are and what their needs are should be the first step before trying to stuff your products down their throats.

All of these need a good understanding of people, not just the customer but those who serve your customers... your employees. Too often, we see employees who operate like robots, going through the motions. They have become over-burdened with unnecessary procedures or paperwork. These are symptoms of rigid control and do not, in any way, contribute to the success of our business. These "robots" have lost sight of customer value and obviously cannot exhibit any form of EQ, no matter how hard you try. Allowing our employees to grasp the value of EQ should be the main consideration as this will allow them to perform better with the customer.

And since it is our frontline that interacts with the customer the most, is it not time that we empower the "troops"? The future of your company could rely on it.

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Arlene K. Yap-Tan is the chief executive officer of Yapster eLearning Inc., which has been providing e-learning and classroom training services for five years to more than 80,000 learners around the world. With more than 1,500 subject titles, Yapster eLearning is accredited by local and international institutions. For more information, visit www.2studyit.com. For comments, e-mail at [email protected].