How To Build Your Customer Listening Skills

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

I've got good news and bad news.

The bad news is something you already know. Customer service employees struggle with listening. They misunderstand customer needs, miss important service cues, and often fail to make an upset customer feel "heard."

Now the good news.

Listening skills are easy to train. This short post will share some straightforward training exercises you can use to improve your customer listening, or help the people on your team.

And these skills work whether you're communicating with a customer face-to-face, over the phone, or via written communication like email or chat.

Why We Don't Listen

In my experience as a customer service trainer, most employees have solid listening skills. The challenge they face is their work environment actively discourages listening.

My book, Getting Service Right, explores a number of obstacles that customer service employees face when trying to understand their customer's needs:

• Time pressure: employees are urged to work quickly.

• Distractions: our work environments are filled with distractions.

• Customers: customers themselves aren't always great at telling their story.

One of the more surprising obstacles is experience. The more experience you have, the harder it becomes to listen. 

The reason is our brains have an instinctive pattern-recognition feature. When we sense a familiar pattern, we automatically shut off listening and jump to a conclusion. So an experienced employee who hears a customer describing a problem they've heard a thousand times before will quickly assume they know the answer.

The trouble with this is our instincts sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion.

I recently went around in circles with a customer service rep who was trying to figure out what caused a problem. “That’s great,” I kept saying. “But what I really need right now is to solve the problem. I only have five more minutes to spend on this issue.” I ended up having to disconnect the conversation and call back again later when I had more time because the rep’s poor listening skills made the interaction take three times as long as it should have.

So if you want to be a better listener, start by making it easier to listen. Try to remove time pressure and other distractions from the environment, or at least become aware of situations where they discourage you from listening.

Listening Skills Training

Here are a few exercises that can help you take your listening skills to the next level.

Tell a Story

This exercise proves you already have good listening skills, you just need to remember to use them on a regular basis. 

1. Find a partner.

2. Have your partner briefly tell you about a recent customer service experience.

3. Give your partner a brief re-cap of what you heard.

4. Discuss the specific skills you used to listen to the story.

The discussion at the end will help you identify some of the listening skills that you naturally use. Your challenge now is to be more intentional about using them with customers, even if you feel time pressure, encounter distractions, or the customer tells a lousy story.

Customer Listening Checklist

Start by watching this short video and observe the listening skills an employee, Janice, uses to listen to an internal customer.

Active listening techniques from Customer Service: Serving Internal Customers by Jeff Toister

Next, take a brief moment after your next five customer service interactions to self-evaluate whether you used the same listening skills Janice demonstrated in the video:

• Concentrate on your customer

• Attending body language

• Clarifying questions

• Listen for emotions

• Paraphrase to confirm

You can take this exercise to the next level by getting your coworkers to participate. Spend a few moments at the end of the day discussing what worked well, and which skills you need to use more often.

Bonus Resource

Many of these techniques apply to written communication, but serving customers via email, chat, or social media does provide some unique challenges. This on-demand webinar with customer service writing expert Leslie O'Flahavan provides some practical activities to help improve your skills.

Culture Report Reveals Executives Disconnected From Reality

There's a scene in the movie, Office Space, that gets me every time. 

Bill Lumbergh, the clueless executive, announces a new culture initiative in an all-hands meeting. "So you should ask yourself, with every decision you make, is this good for the company?" A banner hangs overhead that reads "Is this good for the company?"

It was the beginning, middle, and end of the initiative. 

A new report from the consulting firm PwC shows this type of executive disconnect from corporate culture initiatives is real. A 2018 survey of 2,000 people in 50 countries found large gaps between what executives and employees felt about corporate culture.

You can read some stunning conclusions below or read the entire report here.

Consistency

Companies often create a mission, vision, or value statements to help define the culture. Yet the true culture is how people think and act. 

The report revealed a disconnect in how consistently the cultural statements were followed:

At just 63 percent, even leaders sense there's a huge gap between the culture message and what people are actually doing. The perception is far worse among employees.

There are two causes that I frequently see.

The first is executives try to define the culture all by themselves. They sequester themselves in a conference room or hold a retreat, and dream up what they think the culture should be. 

I've called leaving your employees out of the process the worst mistake in building a service culture. That's because you need everyone represented to come up with an authentic description of how people should think and act.

The second leading cause of the consistency gap is too many culture initiatives are like the banner in Office Space. They're symbolic, with no real commitment behind them. 

So how should you define your culture? I recommend this proven process.

Priority

Employees don't always believe culture is a priority for senior leaders. This graphic is telling:

The root cause is often tied to how culture initiatives play out. The executive team dreams it up behind closed doors, an announcement is made, and employees see little else. 

There may be a culture committee or task force doing some work, but frontline employees don't see that and usually aren't involved. They just see their daily work continue as usual.

The customer-focused companies I researched for The Service Culture Handbook took a very different approach. Leaders in these organizations involved employees every step of the way. For example, a customer service leader at Cars.com shared customer feedback with her team on a daily basis, and solicited employees' ideas on how to fix issues.

Pride

Customer-obsessed employees take a lot of pride in the companies they work for. They love their products and services, believe in the mission, and are often customers themselves.

The PwC report revealed a big gap in company pride between executives and employees:

I interviewed psychologist Gemma Leigh Roberts for my latest book, Getting Service Right, to get a better understanding of the executive disconnect. She shared some interesting insight:

"Challenging your perception of business performance (which you are responsible for leading) can lead you to challenging your own performance, which can be painful for your ego and damaging for your confidence. In this scenario, sometimes executives choose not to acknowledge facts or consider them irrelevant, which is a self-protection strategy."

In other words, executives are human just like the rest of us. Our egos try to protect us from our personal failings, such as creating a miserable work culture.

Take Action

The PwC report revealed that 80 percent of respondents felt their organizational culture must change in the next five years.

If that's you, what are you going to do about it?

My suggestion is to start by defining the culture you want to have with a simple statement called a customer service vision. This is a shared definition of outstanding customer service that gets everyone on the same page.

You can use this step-by-step guide to help you create it. I've assembled some additional culture change resources here.

Lessons Learned from Writing My First Customer Service Book

Note: The following is the preface from my new book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service. It's the second edition of a book called Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It.

The original book was published in 2012 and went out of print in 2016. It was my first as an author, and it provided valuable and unexpected customer service lessons that I've since applied to other books I've written, including The Service Culture Handbook and Customer Service Tip of the Week. 

One lesson was the title itself. 

I wrote the book to help customer service leaders solve a vexing challenge: helping their employees to consistently deliver outstanding service. I imagined a title like Service Failure would instantly resonate with those leaders, and to a large extent, it did. The book sold reasonably well over the four years it was in print and received many positive reviews.

Yet I overlooked something pretty big—my primary customer. Service Failure taught me that the most important customer for a business book is an influencer who shares the book with others. It might be someone who recommends the book to a colleague or uses it to start a book club at work. Or it could be a leader who buys multiple copies and hands them out to their team so everyone can read it and work on the concepts together. 

I soon heard the same feedback again and again: "It's a great read, but there's no way I'm giving someone a book called Service Failure!"

The title that I thought was so catchy actually hurt sales! The experience reminded me that, in customer service, we can't fall too in love with our own ideas. We have to realize that our customers may view things differently, and we need to understand them as best as we can if we want to serve them successfully.

Which brings me to another lesson. 

The original book was literally a service failure. It had a binding problem that caused the pages to fall out as soon as the reader got to page 12! 

I discovered the issue when I received my author's copies from the publisher about six weeks before the official publication date. I quickly alerted my editor, but by then, defective books had already been shipped to retailers. The publisher reprinted the books it still had on hand but decided not to recall the books that had already been distributed. I distinctly remember my publisher saying, "Do you know how much that would cost?!" when he defended the decision not to be more proactive.

The publisher did agree to replace damaged books at no cost if readers contacted the publisher's customer service team directly, but that required the reader to be aware of the offer. So I shared the news as best as I could via my blog, through social media, and with friends and family. My mother-in-law was one of the first people to contact the publisher in an attempt to get a defective book replaced, and she promptly got the run-around from a misinformed customer service representative.

A reader might try to return the book to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but there was a good chance the replacement book would also be defective. I once ordered ten copies of Service Failure from Amazon, and five out of ten were damaged. Amazon promptly sent a replacement order, and three of the five replacements were also defective! These types of repeated problems were a sad irony that made the service failure even worse. 

The situation left me feeling powerless and angry. I know many people decided it just wasn't worth their time to fix the problem. Meanwhile, it was my name, not the publisher's, on the front of the book. I'm sure that created a negative impression for some readers, even though I had no control over the book's printing or distribution.

The experience helped me empathize with what frontline customer service employees go through every day. These employees usually aren't the ones who make defective products, fail to deliver services, or intentionally decide to skimp on quality in an effort to save money. Often under-empowered and under-appreciated, these professionals face their customers' anger and try to make amends.

Getting Service Right represents a second chance to get it right. The new title is more positive, the book-binding issue has been resolved, and I've added new research and insights I discovered after completing the first edition. 

It's often said we never get a second chance to make a first impression. While that's true, we can try to recover from a service failure. And we can learn from each experience, so we can make a great first impression with the next customer we serve. So whether you read the original book and had the pages fall out, or you are discovering this book for the first time, I hope this edition is helpful to you.

The new book, Getting Service Right, is available on Amazon. Get discounts on 25 or more books from BookPal.

Why Customer Service Employees Avoid Taking Ownership

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

"They never have enough cars."

The rental car employee had just picked me up from the auto repair shop and was driving me back to the rental office so I could get a car. He was explaining why I had to wait a few minutes longer than expected.

"Management is supposed to get cars from other locations, but they never do."

Ah, the classic deflection. Rather than simply acknowledge the slight delay and move on (I wasn't the least bit angry), the employee blamed his manager and tried to distance himself from the issue. 

Chances are, someone has done this to you. Or perhaps you've observed one of your employees avoiding ownership when serving a customer. You might have even done it yourself.

Let's examine why employees do it and see if we can find some solutions.

Reasons to Avoid Ownership

Employees often deflect problems when they believe the issue was someone else’s fault. In my book, Getting Service Right, I examined four reasons an employee might avoid taking ownership of a problem they didn't cause.

Here's an excerpt:

If an employee isn't at fault, you might expect them to take action to resolve the problem or pass the complaint along to someone who can address the issue. But what if handling the complaint isn't in an employee's best interests? 

There are several reasons why an employee might not want to address a customer complaint or pass it along to management: 

• The employee fears being reprimanded for causing the complaint.

• The employee feels the complaint will not be properly addressed by management, so sharing the information is a waste of time.

• The employee views handling the problem as an annoyance or inconvenience.

• The employee feels they were treated poorly by the customer, so intentionally mishandling the complaint is a means to exact revenge.

The rental car employee exhibited several of these:

• He distanced himself from the problem in case I complained.

• He said he had shared his concerns with management, but nothing happened. 

• And he told me that a shortage of cars frequently caused him extra work.

Some customer service employees tell me they've gone out of their way for a customer in the past, only to get punished for doing it. One person told me his coworkers caught wind of him putting in some extra effort and started sending him more problems, even if they should have been routed to someone else.

Changing the Deflection Mentality

An ownership mentality has to start with the leader. Leaders who do any of these things can stifle ownership:

• Get frustrated or angry when employees bring them a problem.

• Fail to fix repeated issues or help employees better cope with them.

• Avoid addressing employees who consistently make mistakes.

Training can also help.

For example, I often discuss the true definition of ownership in my training classes. Ownership doesn’t mean accepting blame or personally fixing the problem. Taking ownership simply means accepting responsibility for ensuring the problem gets solved.

Here's a short video to help employees develop an ownership mentality, see good and bad examples, and take steps to accept responsibility for solving problems.

Take ownership of problems from Customer Service Foundations by Jeff Toister

New Customer Service Book: Getting Service Right

Are you endlessly trying to improve your employees' customer service skills, but getting so-so results?

You'll find unexpected solutions in my new book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service. The book is the second edition of Service Failure, updated with new research and examples.

Rather than offering another set of customer service tips, Getting Service Right takes a novel approach by rooting out the real reasons employees don’t consistently deliver the service they should. For instance:

• Company cultures that unwittingly discourage excellent customer service.

• Employees torn between following policy or serving the customer.

• Cost reduction efforts that actually increase the cost of service.

• Poor products and services that make it impossible to satisfy customers.

• Bad habits that make it difficult to listen to customers' needs.

The book is filled with examples from well-known organizations, real stories from frontline employees, and the latest scientific research. These powerful, sometimes counterintuitive insights can be applied at the organizational, departmental, or individual level to help the entire team deliver outstanding customer service.

Here's what a few customer service leaders say about it:

“With multiple strategies supported by real-life examples, Jeff Toister teaches how to avoid service failure and provide service success.” —Shep Hyken, New York Times bestselling author of The Amazement Revolution

“This should be required reading for Customer Experience, Customer Service and HR professionals.” —Bill Schimikowski, Vice President of Customer Experience, Fidelity Investments

"What I love about this book is the personal connection the author has to the topic.” —Alyona Medelyan, CEO, Thematic

“A must read for leaders that are seriously interested in cultivating a culture of customer service excellence.” —John Tiliacos, Executive Vice President of Airport Operations & Customer Service, Tampa International Airport

"There is no shortage of books on customer service, but few are written by someone with as deep and wide an understanding of the issues as this one.” —Shai Berger, CEO, Fonolo

Getting Service Right is available in paperback and e-book formats:

• Paperback (1-2 copies): Amazon

• Paperback (3+ copies): 800-CEO-READ

• E-book: Amazon Kindle

How to Quickly Train Customer Service Skills for Free

Updated: July 26, 2021

Every week, I hear from customer service leaders whose employees are struggling with customer service. They recognize their employees need training, but there's always some obstacle in the way:

• We're too busy!

• There's no budget!

• My employees work remotely!

These obstacles aren't impossible to overcome. Here are some solutions that customer-focused organizations are using right now.

We're too busy!

I don't know of a single customer service team that isn't pressed for time.

Gathering everyone together for a half-day seminar just doesn't work in today's busy environment. Our employees need training, and they need it fast.

One solution is the team huddle.

The UPS contact center in Las Vegas, Nevada uses daily huddles for each of its teams. The meetings are highly choreographed and take just nine minutes. Team leaders gather their employees around a whiteboard where they discuss key metrics, review challenges, and share success stories.

(There's no one way to huddle. Read about other variations here.)

Each huddle is a mini-training session! By the end of the huddle, employees know:

• What's going on in the business.

• How to solve a challenging problem.

• What people are doing well.

Best of all, those huddles add up to 45 minutes of training by the end of the week, and three hours of training by the end of the month. Ta-da! Half-day seminar.

Many organizations have a LinkedIn Learning subscription. If you have access, your employees can take the same approach with customer service training videos.

Let's take my Customer Service Foundations course as an example. It will take 1 hour and 23 minutes to watch the course all the way through. That’s just too much content to dump in your brain all at once.

A better approach would be to have your team watch just one video from the course per day. The videos average about three minutes long, with no video lasting more than five minutes.

Try it! Have your team watch this 2:22 minute video on identifying your customers' emotional needs, hold a brief discussion about it with the team, and then ask everyone to go back to work and apply what they learned. You've just given everyone a useful skill they can apply immediately!

Identify emotional needs from Customer Service Foundations by Jeff Toister

There's no budget!

Two primary factors drive up the cost of customer service training:

1. The cost of the training itself.

2. Paying people to attend training.

Major League Soccer's Chicago Fire addresses both of these issues with simple, highly-targeted sessions called "spark training."

Guest feedback is the starting point. For example, there might be a few complaints about a particular concession stand during a match. The Fire's fan services team will investigate the issue and identify a solution. The solution will be shared with employees at that concession stand via a 15-minute training session immediately before the next match.

This helps eliminate chronic problems, keeps employee sharp, and takes virtually no budget to implement.

You don't need complaints to create simple, low-cost training. The free Customer Service Tip of the Week email is an easy way keep everyone focused on the fundamentals.

1. Start by subscribing here. (You can have your employees subscribe, too!)

2. I'll automatically send you a book with over 52 of my favorite tips.

3. Each week, you'll receive one customer service tip to share with your team.

Customer service leaders have found many creative ways to use these tips for ongoing employee training.

My employees work remotely!

A lot of customer service teams are spread out geographically. You might have multiple offices, work-at-home employees, or a field service business where employees are working onsite at a customer's home.

There are still plenty of ways to train your remote employees.

• Use this guide: All You Need to Know About Training Remote Employees

• Get my 9 tips for engaging virtual audiences

John Peek, owner of Peek Brothers Painting in San Diego, creates short video clips to share weekly reminders with his work crews. Each one is simple, direct, and immediately useful.

These short videos are easily viewable on a smartphone. Here's a great example.

Side note: I've hired Peek Brothers many times over the years. When the company painted my house last year, the crew received multiple compliments from my neighbors for their professionalism and workmanship!

Take Action

Time and budget usually aren't insurmountable barriers to training.

You'll often find there's a way to get things done if you think beyond the traditional seminar and focus on training that's short, convenient, and practical. 

This type of training is sometimes called “microlearning.” Here’s more information on how to create it.

Great Customer Service Leaders Keep Things Simple

I spend a lot of time talking to leaders about service culture. One of the challenges I hear most often is complexity.

None of these leaders actually say "complexity." I hear it in the way they describe their business and what they're doing to get everyone on the same page. They often struggle to articulate exactly what they want their employees to do.

If you can’t describe it, it’s hard for your employees to do it.

One restaurant chain I worked with had a company mission statement, a service slogan, four elements of a "great experience," and a 17-step service procedure that waitstaff had to follow with every guest. The really confusing part was all of these elements pointed to slightly different behaviors. 

Worst of all, there was no agreement on what was most important:

• Executive leaders tended to focus on the mission and service slogan.

• Store managers talked about the four elements of a great experience.

• Shift leaders typically encouraged efficiency over everything else. 

The chain's leadership team had the best intentions when all of these items were created. But they unwittingly created complexity for their employees by giving them too many things to think about.

Keep Things Simple

Leaders in customer-focused companies make things simple for employees, so employees can focus on customers.

Trader Joe's is a terrific example. Founder Joe Coulumbe created the successful grocery chain by focusing on simplicity:

• Smaller product selection than typical grocery stores

• Less square footage than typical grocery stores

• No coupons

• No loyalty program

What you will find in Trader Joe's are high-quality, reasonably priced products along with friendly and helpful employees who are really knowledgeable. A Trader Joe's staffs more employees than most grocery stores, so it's also easier to find help when you need it.

At the restaurant chain, I asked the leadership team to decide which statement was the most important. It took some discussion, but they ultimately decided the mission statement would be the main thing. 

The 17-step service procedure still contained helpful operating guidelines for servers, but it needed some changes. It was shortened to just ten steps, and those steps were carefully aligned with the mission. 

These changes suddenly made it far easier for servers to understand what was most important when serving guests.

Take Action

Here's an exercise that can help you focus your organization or team on simplicity.

Start by taking an inventory of existing cultural artifacts. These are statements, slogans, models, or other items that help define your culture. Examples include:

• Mission statements

• Vision statements

• Values

• Brand promises

• Mottos

• Service slogans

• Service standards

Next, identify which one of these is most important. The way to do this is imagine an employee is in the midst of serving a customer. What one statement do you want the employee to use as a guide?

The answer for many companies is "none" or "we're not sure." If that's the case, you may want to start from scratch by creating a single customer service vision.

Finally, take this mini-assessment to see how well your business is aligned with the single statement or slogan you chose. It's a shorter version of an in-depth service culture assessment I offer to my clients.

Five Surprising Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service

I recently facilitated an unusual webinar. 

Rather than drone on about the concepts, we used interactive activities to highlight common customer service challenges and share solutions. These are all concepts from my new book, Getting Service Right.

Here's a link to the webinar replay video along with my answers to some of the participants' questions.

Watch the Webinar

You can watch the webinar on YouTube.

Questions & Answers

We ran out of time before I could answer all of the participants’ questions, so here are some responses to questions I couldn’t answer during the live session:

Q: What do you think the biggest obstacle to great customer service is when you're working virtually? (All clients are remote.) I've worked in contact centers, so I've experienced this first-hand. The specific obstacles you face depend on how you're communicating with your customers.

When you're on the phone, the visual element is the biggest thing missing. Customers can't read your body language and you can't see their's. It's difficult to show them something, like a picture or a diagram, that might help resolve the issue if you were face-to-face. In this situation, I try to use as much visual language as possible. For example, I'll ask, "Are you near a computer?" and if they are, I might direct them to a website so we can look at the same thing.

It gets even more challenging via written channels like chat or email. There's typically a lag between responses, and you and your customer can't hear each other's tone of voice. In these situations, I try to carefully read what they write to fully understand their needs. I also try to anticipate what question they would answer next if we were having a live conversation. Then I try to write a short, helpful response that answers both their current and predicted next question along with providing links to additional resources.

Q: Are the "You are 4th in line" or "Approximate time is 3 minutes" good tools in the phone customer service process? They can be! When a customer is waiting on hold, there are a number of factors that can influence how they perceive the wait. One is having a clear sense of how long the wait will last. Customers are more likely to remain patient if they have a reasonable wait time estimate and it doesn’t feel like it’s too long. If your system allows it, I'd lean towards giving an approximate wait time since this is more meaningful to a customer than their position in line.

You can read a list of factors that influence wait time perception here.

Another good solution is to offer a callback solution like Fonolo. I had a chance to interview Shai Berger, Fonolo's CEO, and he shared some interesting insight about callbacks.

Q: What are some tips on calibrating your team/creating a consistent definition for outstanding customer service in regards to your individual business? The best way to create a consistent definition of outstanding customer service is to involve your team. Give each person a chance to give their input. You can read more in this step-by-step guide.

Once you create the vision, you can keep everyone calibrated by helping employees develop consistent answers to these questions:

1. What is the customer service vision?

2. What does it mean?

3. How do I personally contribute?

Calibration is an ongoing process. Leaders in customer-focused organization use the vision to set goals, make hiring decisions, train employees, empower the team, and even give feedback. 

Q: Do you feel your new book would be appropriate to hand out to customer service agents Yes! While customer service leaders are the primary audience, the book will help agents better understand obstacles they personally face and identify solutions.

I’ve created some special offers for anyone who buys the book by Friday, April 5.

Interview with John Goodman About Strategic Customer Service

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

A happy customer will tell five people about their experience while an unhappy customer will tell ten people. That statistic has been part of customer service folklore for decades.

But where did it come from?

It originated in a study commissioned by The Coca-Cola Company in 1980 to evaluate the impact of handling complaints lodged with its consumer affairs department. This was one of the first efforts to quantify the impact of good customer service, and the results were eye-opening:

• Nearly 10 percent of fully satisfied customers bought more Coca-Cola products.

• Roughly 75 percent of dissatisfied customers purchased fewer Coca-Cola products, including more than 30 percent who stopped buying altogether.

John Goodman, one of the study's authors, recently joined me for a short interview to discuss his new book, the second edition of Strategic Customer Service. This is a must-have resource for any customer service leader who wants to make an impact on their business.

If you’re like me, and you nerd out on customer service data, you’ll love this conversation. We discuss:

• The impact of customer service on word-of-mouth advertising.

• Ways that companies can proactively deliver outstanding service.

• How "customer onboarding" is a pain point in many companies.

• What service leaders can do to become more comfortable with business metrics.

• One tip you can implement immediately to improve service.

You can watch the interview here.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and reference it several times in my own book, Getting Service Right. You can find Strategic Customer Service on Amazon.

Unlock Your Employee Empowerment with this Hidden Secret

A customer once taught me an important lesson about empowerment.

I was a national account manager for a uniform company that sold hats, jackets, shirts and items embroidered or screen printed with a company's logo. My customer was frustrated by a two-week wait for a product sample. In my inexperience, I meekly tried to explain the limits of our process. I'll never forget his retort:

"Isn't that what they pay you for? Sometimes, you've gotta bend the rules."

He was right. I managed to get the customer's sample order out in three days rather than two weeks. It took a lot of effort, and I bent a lot of rules, but he was happy.

I blamed our strict policies and procedures for making things so difficult. 

Years later, I discovered a hidden secret to improving employee empowerment. Counterintuitively, it's having strict processes. It turns out the ones we had at the uniform company just weren't the right ones.

The Definition of Empowerment

When I researched customer-focused companies for The Service Culture Handbook, I was surprised to learn that leaders at elite companies had a different view of empowerment.

You can read a more detailed explanation, but here's a quick summary:

Empowerment really means enabling employees to provide outstanding customer service. There are three elements required:

1. Resources: good products, services, tools, etc.

2. Process: a consistent way of doing things right.

3. Authority: the ability to bend the rules when needed.

We had pretty good products and I had a lot of authority at the uniform company. It was our processes that stunk. Following the standard processes resulted in longer leader times and more shipping errors. Following our pricing policy led to higher prices. All of those were a recipe for angry customers.

Why a Strict Process is Essential

Quality was a real problem at the uniform company.

We'd often ship the wrong item, embroider the wrong logo, or fail to detect a damaged item. Customers already frustrated by long lead times would go through the roof when their shipment arrived and it wasn't quite right.

I had the authority to hold any order until I personally inspected it. This allowed me to catch errors before they shipped out.

The inspection process added a day to the already long lead time. And when I did catch a problem, I could have the problem fixed (adding to the lead time), but I was rarely able to address the root cause of the issue.

It would have been so much better if I could have trusted that my customers' orders ship out correct and on time. That was the missing piece that would have enabled me to spend more time proactively addressing customer needs rather than just playing defense and trying to prevent errors.

Strict, reliable processes are essential to empowerment. 

Amazon is able to ship products from its warehouses at blazing speed with fantastic accuracy because of a tightly choreographed fulfillment system. Each step is carefully documented and monitored.

Do Amazon employees have the authority to deviate from the process?

Yes, but only if there's a reason. For example, when I toured an Amazon fulfillment center, I saw employees shut down a shipping line when they detected an error and needed to identify the root cause. 

Tinker to Constantly Improve

My biggest account at the uniform company was an anomaly. 

A competitor held a master contract with the corporate office, so I had to target the customer's individual locations. Rather than selling a thousand uniform shirts at a time, my average order from this customer was about ten items.

Our factory's smallest embroidery machine could put a logo on six garments at a time. So the factory set a minimum order size of six items with the same logo in an effort to run more efficiently. A lot of orders from my big client had fewer than six embroidered items, which caused us to lose business.

I organized a meeting with production leaders to find a solution. We worked out a plan to group orders from this customer together so it was easier to meet the minimum. 

Here's what would happen:

• Location A might order two shirts on Monday

• Location B might order one shirt on Tuesday

• Location C might order three shirts on Thursday

By Thursday, I had enough shirts to meet the six item minimum, so the production team would start the orders for locations A, B, and C at the same time. 

This might delay the orders for locations A and B by couple of days, but it was better than refusing the business altogether. And I learned that I could earn some goodwill by telling the customer I found a way around our six item minimum.

There was just one snag in the plan. A different embroidery pattern was required for different types of materials and fabric weaves. So if location A ordered two cotton oxford shirts, location B ordered a polyester work shirt, and location C ordered three poly-cotton blend polo shirts, I'd actually need three different embroidery patterns.

That put me back to square one since the embroidery machines could only follow one pattern at a time.

The solution was experimenting to find more universal embroidery patterns that would look great on multiple fabric and weave types. Cutting down the number of different patterns required made it easier to meet the minimum of six items with the same logo.

Customer-focused companies constantly tinker with processes.

Southwest Airlines provides a great example. It experimented for years with different boarding processes until it arrived at the system it uses today. Customers are assigned a boarding group (A, B, or C) at check-in along with a number that tells them when to board. So the passenger with A31 on their boarding pass will board right after the passenger with A30. The process allows Southwest to board its planes very quickly with minimal passenger confusion.

That doesn't mean Southwest is done tinkering. The airline is currently testing boarding planes through both the front and rear doors. 

Conclusion

I was ultimately laid off from my job at the uniform company. 

All those broken processes finally caught up to us. Competitors were able to ship orders faster, with fewer errors, at lower prices. My department was eliminated in a cost-cutting reorganization effort.

One thing that doomed us was we didn't have a process for fixing repeated problems. I'd share feedback with my boss and he'd just shrug and say there's nothing we could do. 

Getting laid off turned out to be fantastic for my career. I got a job as a contact center training supervisor. My new boss, Debbi, was a mentor who helped me grow my training and leadership skills. One thing Debbi encouraged me to do was work with my team to develop really good processes.

You can find more information about empowerment on this resource page.