Customer Service Excellence Through Empowering Staff

The willingness of management to let go of control, and leave it to their staff to make sensible decisions on behalf of the customers and, by extension, the organisation. That’s what happened here, to everyone’s benefit: the staff, as well as their customers and the organisation. Everyone feels better. It may even drive up performance, in that staff may want to think of really powerful, creative and customer centred ways of spending their $5. It may even encourage teamwork, in that individual staff can group together to share their $5 allowance…

Too often perhaps, lip service is paid to major sentiments like ‘empowerment’. Words are easy, and often appear in mission statements, policies, publicity and posters on the wall. So for example, this hotel chain could have said they were an empowering organisation, through any of those outlets, and yet fail to deliver empowerment ‘on the ground’. Customers and staff are only likely to talk positively about ‘empowerment’ if that is their lived experience. You will not hear staff or customers telling friends and relatives about the excellent posters on empowerment, or how much the mission statement endorses it. But they will talk about their experience – and they may not even mention the word ‘empowerment’ – but it is there for all to see.

Of course any service industry will want their staff to be ‘customer focused’; staff may even have attended training sessions to further reinforce the message, and even develop key ‘customer care skills’. But to many staff, perhaps, what they do is simply ‘a job’, perhaps passively. But give the same people $5 a day to invest in the customer, that’s different. Now what the staff are doing is not working for the customer, so much as investing in the customer. This time it’s a personal contract: something tangible, something given and received. And most people will take care in making an investment. It matters, is visible, and noticeable.

In this example, staff are being treated as adults (rather than as is sometimes the case, as children). They have been given each of the following: an amount to spend; decisions to make; a choice to be made; ownership; responsibility; accountability. All typically associated with adults. And on the whole, most adults really want to be treated as adults.

Of course any service industry will want their staff to be ‘customer focused’; staff may even have attended training sessions to further reinforce the message, and even develop key ‘customer care skills’. But to many staff, perhaps, what they do is simply ‘a job’, perhaps passively. But give the same people $5 a day to invest in the customer, that’s different. Now what the staff are doing is not working for the customer, so much as investing in the customer. This time it’s a personal contract: something tangible, something given and received. And most people will take care in making an investment. It matters, is visible, and noticeable.

It’s well known that most dissatisfied customers don’t complain to the organisation – they complain to friends, relatives and colleagues. And the same is true of a positive experience: people are really happy to share that experience with others. And this story is a great example of that. I’ve heard about it, even though I live in the UK; and friends and relatives who hear about this service are likely to put this chain at the top of their ‘booking a hotel’ options list - and from this perspective alone it seems like $5 well spent!