No matter where
they take place or what kind of brand, product, or organization
they involve, every employee-customer interaction involves three
simultaneous processes: actions, treatment, and knowledge.
·
Actions are the functional aspects -- that is, all the activities
that an employee is supposed to perform on the customer’s
behalf. For instance, when a guest checks in at a hotel, this
includes transforming a reservation into a registration, taking
note of the guest’s information, asking for preferences, and
delivering information.
·
Treatment represents the employee’s personal touch, the
positive or negative attitudes that set the tone of the
customer’s emotional response to what the employee is doing.
Friendliness, courtesy, and respect represent frequently mentioned
characteristics of personal treatment.
·
Knowledge refers to information and advice, which customers
appreciate as “enhancing the value” of their
experience. Factual information is the component that usually
becomes the center of attention from a functional perspective.
Advice, however, can only be valuable as a result of the
interpretation of information filtered through the talent themes of
an employee.
The important
thing to remember is this: While the action component is driven by
the organization’s functional structure, treatment and
knowledge are not. These two are dependent upon the particular
innate inclinations of every individual in a team. These traits
cannot always be passed along from person to person, cannot always
be scripted or systematized. That’s why being aware of the
individual personal strengths of every front-line employee is so
crucial. Developing the awareness about how each of these strengths
can be productively applied to enhance the customer experience,
thereby promoting emotional attachment, is the key component of a
manager’s job.
The process breaks
down this way. Actions, along with a fraction of knowledge, are
processed by the rational mind. However, the rest of the process --
the majority of the knowledge and all of the treatment -- are
stored as emotional memory. These aspects are
“felt.”
There are as many
variations on fitting the expectations of an engaging customer
relationship as there are stars in the universe. In some situations
the customer touchpoint is fast paced, allowing just a few seconds
for personal impact. What occurs in the first seven seconds of the
interaction between a person selling cars and a customer buying one
sets the emotional stage for the entire proceedings.
In others the
interaction is continuous, requiring very different employee
strength applications. In the case of a financial adviser, the
needs of a customer may go on for years, so success might be
measured in paying attention to the client’s comfort zone and
knowing when to suggest an investment and when to pull back.
No employee can be
scripted to generate the right emotions in others. Nor can the
emotional mind be fooled. It senses whether an interaction is
genuinely positive or negative. That’s why the great managers
use three links, to make sure that action, treatment, and knowledge
are achieved every time an employee interacts with a customer.