HR Perspective
with
Memory Nguwi
Business organisations thrive on the goodwill of customers.
But how efficient are organisations in serving customers? The level of customer satisfaction in your organisation is directly related to the calibre of customer services personnel you employ. There are some organisations that are disgracefully known for their poor customer service.
Most organisations in our country are involved in the provision of service and an increasing number of the workforce requires interaction with the customer on a daily basis. Consequently, the concept of good customer service has gained widespread acceptance as an integral performance component of most business organisations.
It is very unfortunate that few organisations do proper customer satisfaction surveys. These normally help the organisation understand those issues customers are concerned with. Most businesses fail to achieve the desired results because they take their customers for granted. Some businesses are also taking advantage of the limited choices available to the customers. Executives, however, need to understand that time will come when your customers will desert you and you will have no business to run.
Customer service orientation is taking an ever-increasing level of importance in today's economy where survival is the ultimate goal. You can survive in business if your employees can serve your customers to their satisfaction.
Organisations need to be extremely careful when selecting people who are going to be in contact with customers. Few organisations have a documented recruitment policy that guides the organisation through the process of selecting staff into the organisation. The recruitment policy should spell out in very clear terms how the organisation is going to recruit staff including the selection criteria for each position.
One of the approaches to improving the level of customer service in your organisation is by paying attention to the calibre of employees who join your organisation. A person with a deviant personality will destroy your business. One key element organisations need to assess when recruiting customer services' personnel is the personality of the individual they are going to employ. It is almost impossible to detect and describe an individuals' personality through the interview method. However, personality-profiling methods exist that can help the organisation identify the personality characteristics of each individual joining their organisation. Organisations need a way to identify those individuals who have the demeanor to effectively serve the public and personality profiling is one of them.
Personality concerns the way we characteristically respond to other people and situations, how we relate to other people, how we tackle problems, our emotionality and responsiveness to stress and so on. Test items of these traits do not have right and wrong answers. Rather they try to measure how much or little we possess of a specified trait or set of traits.
Matching the right personality to the right position or team is critical to the success of your company. If the job calls for someone who can easily change duties on a regular basis, you need someone who is flexible to change. If a job calls for someone to work primarily alone, you would want a motivated self-starter. Achieving the perfect fit between employee and job or team is directly related to personality.
In response to an increasingly competitive marketplace the necessity for selecting high quality service employees has become apparent. The need for such employees is more apparent in the expanding service industry. A lot of us would testify that the quality of service in most organisations is appalling. Some of the customer services employees are very rude. In some cases the level of service is tantamount to abuse. With this level of service, the ability to identify and select quality service-oriented employees becomes critical for an organisation's success.
There is an extensive history of research examining the link between personality characteristics and effective customer service orientation. Personality characteristics have been shown to predict overall effectiveness in terms of business outcomes. Research has demonstrated that employees' services orientation and ability to provide quality service affects both customer satisfaction and subsequent purchase intentions. Two factors normally influence employees' tendency to provide quality customer service: organisational climate and individual personality. For employees to be able to provide quality customer service, the organisation itself must promote a quality service culture.
A critical concern for employers seeking to improve customer service in their organisations is whether customer service personnel can be trained. As noted above customer service orientation may be influenced not only by stable personality characteristics but also by organisational culture. Yes it is possible to train people in customer service but they need to have the right personality profile for a service job before they can be trained. It will be very difficult to train an employee to help others if they do not have a helping disposition in their personality. A growing services sector combined with increased corporate emphasis on customer-focused operations has increased the use of personality assessment in employee selection.
Organisations can ignore customer service at their own peril. I would urge executives to read Jim Collins' recent book "How the mighty fall". Being arrogant when everything is going well for your organisation can lead to down fall.
- Memory Nguwi is the Managing Consultant of Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd a management and human resources consulting firm. Phone 481946-48/481950/2900276/2900966 or cell number 091 2356 361 or email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit our website at www.ipcconsultants.com
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