The Three Links

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.