Customer Service Speaker suggests introducing Merit Pay-to achieve customer satisfaction

There were perhaps six critical conversations I've had that have shaped my professional career counseling. One of them was an operations manager of a division of Federal Express.

I had just completed a successful national training program for the field sales force, so my credibility and confidence were soaring. Then, I heard a simple question, but challenging.

"We know how to measure sales productivity," he said. "But there is something that can be developed which will measure the productivity of customer service?"

Instinctively, I thought: "Why bother? Even if we can do it, I hate repetition."
But I held my tongue, sensing that this was a rare opportunity to revisit some of my hypotheses.

My instinctive reaction was informed by years of doing seminars around the country where I have met sales and services in the same sessions. Evaluations told me that they felt opponents with value systems are mutually exclusive.

Types of sales tend to see themselves as adventurers, thieves high-wire types, who crave adventure and embrace risk. They thrive on contingent pay, the prospect to receive heavy commissions and bonuses when they make big sales.

People of services tend to be more risk averse. Often, they have a clerical mentality, which praises the precision penalizing errors. I felt, my heart, that if we told them that their pay should be variable even in part, on the basis of achievement, they rebel.

This was more than supposition on my part. I was introduced to cross-sell programs for the years in service departments, the experience that has informed my best-selling book, Sales Skills For The Non-Vendor. I found I could design a great plan to sell services to people, yet many would balk, even after achieving success and financial rewards through it.

I have explained, in a very simple way, that simply did not want to be sellers, and that's it. Noting resistance from the troops, senior management, in those days, he refused to push for the implementation, despite the fact that large profits were left on the table.

What, if anything, has changed from when I was asked this question?

Four crucial things:

(1) We know much more about the achievement of customer service measurement.

(2) job enlargement, downsizing, CRM, and the increase of professionalism in business, have contributed to an expectation of responsibility expanded social responsibility and high performance.

(3) global competition, especially by knowledge workers in countries like India, China and elsewhere, is beginning to exert pressure on domestic workers to find ways to increase their contributions, if only to keep jobs onshore.

(4) The management is more aware of costs and profits than ever.

Customer Service Achievement

If there were three commandments written in the past to be able CSR were reduced to: (1) good sound, (2) Defuse angry customers, and (3) Make no mistake entering or retrieving data or recite political societies.

Now, members are discouraged from focusing primarily on themselves, on customer service, or crossing movements while working. They need to focus on results: customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Are shown, by training new and discrete, real-time performance measures, such as to assess the impact they are having transactional satisfaction and the decision of a customer to buy again from their organizations.

To borrow a phrase from Peter F. Drucker, suddenly the customer management process is managed for results.

If we can objectively monitor, measure, manage and replicate the results systematically clients, there is no reason not to grant better pay for people who can produce them.

Future articles will explore some of the other key changes that have occurred, and discuss the pragmatic introduction of a pay-for-performance plan in the context of customer service .......