One Innovative Way to Empower Employees

One of the most important tasks any company faces, when it comes to providing a good customer experience, is to empower its customer-facing employees to make the right decisions and take the right actions whenever its own policies or processes don’t adequately tell them what the best course of action is. 

This is why corporate culture is so critical to your success, as a customer-centric company. Culture can be defined in many ways, but basically it prescribes what employees do when no one is looking, or when the rules aren’t defined.

And there are many customer service situations in which the rules aren’t defined. You might have detailed policies for how refunds are issued, for example, or how service problems are to be resolved, but inevitably your front-line service people will encounter special cases – situations that you just didn’t plan for. You can’t plan for every possible situation. It’s impossible.

This is why it’s so important to ensure that your customer-facing workers are engaged in their jobs, and that everyone shares the same basic idea about the “direction of success.” When trying to address some customer problem there are many different possible actions, but if your employees all agree on the proper direction of success, then you can have more confidence that they’ll be able to select the right action. 

My own view is that the most reliably useful direction to provide customer-facing employees is to treat customers fairly, the way you’d want to be treated yourself, if you were the customer. But of course this direction will often conflict with policies and processes that have been designed not to treat customers fairly, but to generate the most possible profit, or incur the least possible costs.  These are classic “alignment” problems that every company has to wrestle with whenever trying to become more customer oriented. 

But last week in a meeting with a financial services company in Australia I learned of a highly innovative method they are using to empower their front-line employees.  They haven’t rolled this policy out to the entire organization yet, but they are testing it, and I was told it looks promising. 

Basically, when a problem arises that might require an exception to prescribed policy in order to satisfy the customer, the worker trying to solve the problem is encouraged to come up with a creative resolution that he or she thinks is appropriate, even if it is “out of policy.”  But then, before they are authorized to apply that solution, the worker is required to seek the agreement of at least one other customer-facing employee, who will also sign on to the action.  The company says that whenever two customer-facing employees both agree that a particular unique or different solution to some customer issue is the right way to proceed, then it will be automatically approved by the company, and reviewed later to see if it might have broader application.

I’m sorry, but I was just blown away by the straightforward logic of this idea. And of course, the more engaged your workers are with your firm – the more coherent your culture is and the stronger your employees' unified sense of the right “direction of success” is – the faster this kind of policy will work to improve your customer experience, from the bottom up.