Are Your Systems Undermining the Work Your Employees are Doing?

It's IMPOSSIBLE for me to answer this survey. It's the wrong question. Thinking back to my interaction with Sears on December 29th, the representative I talked to was AMAZING; she was doing her job and doing it well in spite of the myriad obstacles the Sears Corporation had put in her way.

She wasn't the only one. There were countless salespeople, technicians and customer service folks who did their very best to help me solve my 12-month issue inside the system they've been given. The unfortunate part in all this is that the Sears SYSTEM is terrible and based on their SYSTEM, I would not refer them.

Honestly, I'd refer each and every employee that I interacted with over the company. But I'd never refer Sears. So I'm doing NOTHING.

Are Your Systems Sabotaging Your People and Costing You Customers?

As a marketing (and market research) professional, I know what Sears is doing. They are tracking each individual step in their customer's journey and using this Net Promoter Score question as a shortcut. The sad part is that this survey is a double-edged sword that is giving the company using it misinformation. If I give a low score saying that I won't refer Sears, the poor woman I spoke to will be punished or not get a bonus (not fair). If I give them a high rating, she gets rewarded for doing her job well, but Sears thinks everything is just peachy and it's not.

While this approach may work for some transactions, it's making the assumption that your systems are working really well, when in fact, your people are covering up a whole lot of hurt in your systems.

In my year-long experience with the Sears customer service system, every employee was empathetic and frustrated because the system would not allow them to help the customer the way they wanted to help the customer. That's understandable, Sears is a behemoth organization. But that's not so for small businesses.

One great blessing of being a small business is that you can pull your people together, especially your customer service folks, engineers, marketing and sales people and LISTEN to their interactions with your customers. Where are your systems falling short? What are their ideas for fixing them?

Don't be afraid of what you find out -- be more afraid of what you don't