A Study of Leadership & Employees in Customer Care

In today’s competitive landscape, effective leadership is essential for enhancing employee engagement & driving customer satisfaction in the customer care sector

Shyama Prasad Subudhi

The other day, I stumbled upon one beautiful question from none other than the great management expert, Peter Drucker, who asked between ‘doing the things right’ and ‘doing the correct thing?’ While both answers are seemingly correct, the latter has some rightful explanation. In a business environment, both things happen, but prudence lies in doing the right thing while aiming at what the consumer or the end user wants at the end of the day.

While on the subject, it also reminds me of another famous saying by none other than our legendary late Ratan Tata, who used to say, “I do not believe in taking right decisions…I take decisions and then make them right. So always believe in your ability & efforts.” With a delicate analysis, this is an emphatic ‘YES’ to doing the right thing.

The intrinsic quality of a leader in any organization, in every section and every location, drives him towards the final accomplishment of the task ahead, following this basic principle. Otherwise, organizations will perish away not by any sudden misfortune but by gradual suffocation due to their wrong approach when there are no takers for the supposedly best products produced by the best people under their arms.

This reminds me of a classification penned by some management scientists. They have categorized all the employees under four different buckets:  stars, workhorses, problem children, and deadwood. Going by this, organizations should aim to fill the buckets more with star performers and simultaneously adopt both top-down and bottom-up policies to aim at doing the right thing at the right time by the right set of employees.

This will happen by having the right leaders in the hierarchical ladder where leaders understand and do not hate mirrors which of course just reflect them. Leaders must know how to communicate properly by having the right conversations with their employees to relate, connect, and listen well enough. Someone rightly said that a leader leads by example and carries their employee fraternity along by motivating and inspiring them not only on fundamentals for the right approach to get on to the root cause analysis but also on the right work-life balance to get an auto drive from within towards accomplishment of any daunting task.

In a little exaggeration, I need to quote here the nice narration about work-life balance by Gary Keller concerning 5 balls. He termed Work as a rubber ball, which, if dropped, will bounce back, whereas family, health, friends, and integrity are other 4 glass balls that, if dropped, will get scuffed, nicked, and perhaps be shattered irrevocably. A leader in a team ushers the team to walk far by binding them together. Once these basic tenets are in place, employees in an organization can do better R&D of consumer behavior/queries as internal customers. Organizations do not change. People do, and individuals do.

A leader in a customer care function needs to involve its employees in process standardization to get closer to customers in terms of data /trust/cost. This reminds me of the MD, Tata Motors, who would often visit customers in truck unions to obtain raw feedback from the horse’s mouth. In parallel, customers meet, visit manufacturing plants, invite customers through free check-up campaigns, offer them many value-added services, and visit customer locations by employees in a customer care function can be organized to get closer to customers. With this, employees can find new insights /ideas/strategies to take the brand in a new direction.

Most consumers use external agencies to do such research.  However, while external agencies can give a broad-based idea about the areas for improvement, they cannot bring in those perspectives like feedback about service areas concerning shabby reception, use of special tools during the repair of a product in a workshop, etc. Hence, there is a need to focus on the core areas of its internal customers-employees.

The toughest question faced by business leaders today is: How do I separate my brand from others? They want to come up with insights that flow from the needs, wants, hopes, and aspirations of customers. Employees as internal customers can provide more valuable data than any research agency.

Though many organizations are hiring house multi-national consulting consumers to do an in-house study for improvement and betterment of customer service delivery, it sometimes does not yield much harvest as the solution is already sheltered inside the employees’ minds and needs to be explored and exploited. The senior management, first of all, needs to appreciate and accept this and then systematically implement the business excellence management system and the TQM techniques for efficacious service delivery.

(The author was a senior executive in automobile sector. Views expressed are personal.)