Many companies strive for a specific culture, but it’s especially important in service industries where there is a high touch between employees and customers in one-on-one environments. This is essentially where the culture is exposed to the public and the impact is revealed immediately. So what are the right customer facing behaviors that you should have as part of your culture?
Shadowmatch measures specific behaviors that often lend themselves towards employees that have to deal with customers. These are behaviors such as conflict handling, people-positive relationships, altruism, and so on. We can say with a certain degree of confidence that these people have patterns of behavior that allow them to align with dealing with customers. It’s fairly obvious right? But, there are a couple of things that you should consider before you revamp your hiring and performance management strategy:
1. Sometimes task-cultured employees (i.e. NOT people) are better at managing customers. As a case in point, Shadowmatch has looked at successful bank tellers and found that the best of the best actually do not attempt to connect or build relationships with customers, because to do so would complicate the process. Think about it: when you’re busy and trying to deposit checks, are you looking for a “friend” or just trying to get your task accomplished as quickly and efficiently as possible?
2. Recognize that your inward and outward facing cultures may need to be significantly different. It’s actually necessary that companies should have multiple “sub-cultures” for their organization. Sometimes it’s a great pairing to have both people and task oriented individuals working two sides of the same problem. The customer-cultured employees may be the best at negotiating a situation with a customer or client, but may benefit from having a task-cultured employee to follow through with the execution of the resolution or action items.
Another great example in the category of “not what you might expect” is the behavioral patterns of many HR people that we work with. Surely, these people need to be completely “people” oriented in the behaviors? Actually it’s the opposite, and almost certainly because they need to be somewhat “detached” in order to be objective and execute their roles effectively and fairly.
Having problems figuring out exactly what your customer-facing culture should be for your employees? Let us show you what works best for your organization.