Emotional Connection as Service Excellence
You cannot achieve service excellence without meeting the cognitive (intellectual and emotional) needs of your employees and customers. For a great billion dollar example of this check on the new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.
If you want to get a free taste, read the excerpt provided by Strategy+Business (registration required). Here is my favorite part:
“At Zappos, we don’t measure call times (our longest phone call was almost six hours long!), and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection (internally referred to as PEC) with the customer.”
From scripts, measurement of the “average handle time” and upsell to personal emotional connections. That is a shift from meeting the cognitive needs of managers trying to control the service to the employees and customers that are experiencing the service. Bravo!
