Last month Return on Performance magazine asked me to respond to a series of questions on motivating employees to attract new customers in a recovering economy for their “Winning Tips” section. My responses below reflect many of the internal service and servant leadership themes found throughout my work – and this month’s issue.

Ask yourself…
Does our management staff serve our servers? How do we know? Do we have good data – and not just management opinions – on what engages and disengages our front-line people?

You might consider…
Involving frontline service staff in identifying customer expectations and tracing those back through the organization to focus internal priorities and services needed from support departments.

I’ve always found that…
Frontline service staff reflect the service levels they are getting from the organization. Too many managers “snoopervise” rather than look for ways to build partnerships in strengthening the service chain of customer to service staff to support teams to management.

Whatever you do, don’t…
Use customer service measures to beat up service staff, isolate customer service as strictly a frontline function, or focus on training frontline servers without aligning organizational processes/systems, and developing the organization’s support values and skills.

Here at The CLEMMER Group, our approach is…
Build a strong service culture through a five step process; 1. Articulate customer service vision, values, and purpose/mission; 2. Develop Supervisors, Managers, and Executives Leadership Behaviors; 3. Align Management Processes/Systems; 4. Develop Frontline Staff’s Leadership Skills; and 5. Continuous Improvement and Organization Development.

Keep in mind…
Frontline staff are external symptom carriers for the internal health of a company’s culture. High-performing cultures are created by strong leadership at all levels built around the core belief that “leadership is an action, not a position.”

The bottom line is…
A company’s culture is “the way we really do things around here” and most clearly shines through in the behaviors of frontline staff to customers and internal departments to each other when no supervisors, managers, or executives are present.