Only the very best need apply to work in these departments
73% of all people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.
There are two vital areas of any business - where only the best of the best should work.
Those vital departments are HR and Customer Service.
These are the two departments that literally hold and coddle some of your most important business assets - your staff and your customers.
Populate these areas with idiots and what you are really saying to the world is that you care less about both.
Sadly most HR departments tend to hire individuals with very little people management skills; the same can be said of customer service units.
Why is that?
Why do so many organisations believe that it's okay to skimp on staff costs when it comes to HR and Customer Service?
73% of all people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Yet only 49% of U.S. consumers say companies provide a good customer experience today.
Reframing is needed
Perhaps what is needed is a reframing of the purpose of these teams.
HR ideally should exist to maximise the potential of the talent that you hire and pay for.
Customer service is not just there to solve problems that customers have, but should rather be seen as the nervous system of the organisation - feeding vital information back to other operational teams about potential risks and barriers before they become a real issue so that the right solutions can be found early.
What should you do about it?
As organisations rely more and more on technology as a business enabler, the danger is that they start to believe that technology will solve their customer experience problems too.
It won't.
In fact, as your reliance on technology to conduct operations increases, the need for a very strong human touch behind the tech increases dramatically.
And human touch doesn't simply mean putting anybody in a position and ticking a box - that human offering the much-lauded touch to the customer needs to be super-friendly and unbelievably efficient and competent.
Research shows that if you give customers a great experience - they’ll buy more, be more loyal and share their experience with friends.
The same goes for your staff.
In this increasingly digital age, it makes a lot of business sense to spend more time and money on hiring and training people whose job it is to work with people.