The tip of the spear

While the Commonwealth’s businesses are fighting for every dollar they can get, it’s not a bad time to ponder the customer service realm.

Please, a show of hands if you’ve got a similar story: My pals and I had a favorite lunch spot on Saipan, but we eventually abandoned it after the service became so bad it wasn’t just annoying, it was positively wretched. None of us complained about it. Hey, we’re not the complaining types. But we did stop going. So did everyone else, I suppose, since the place went under. The pity is that it was otherwise a very nice place with great food, and the owner had obviously invested a lot of money and effort in the startup. Alas, it was all for naught. Here’s the moral I saw: The lowest-paid, and lowest-skilled, employees are usually the ones who directly define the customer experience.

Those floor workers are the tip of the spear. And if the tip of the spear isn’t sharp, then it doesn’t matter if the rest of it is solid gold, does it?

But there are ways to sharpen it. From my corporate days I distilled things down to three points, if for no other reason than to give myself a little checklist. Here it is: (a) People, (b) Process, and (c) Hierarchy.

People, by which I mean employees interfacing with customers, are often treated by management as “human resources,” merely homogenous units of input that, like lumps of coal, are thrown into the process. Such is the dysfunction of our bureaucratic age. Even a kid can see through it. I worked my first retail job at age 15, and I quickly saw that the workers on the floor had a wide range of quality: Some were friendly, pleasant, and could solve minor problems, and others were sour-faced, snippy, and perversely proud of being unable to solve anything. I don’t think that humans are “resources.” I think they’re people.

Incidentally, the CNMI’s work force has a lot of very capable workers, many of whom have excellent customer service skills, so when I encounter shortcomings I think it’s a management shortfall. Much is probably due to absentee owners who have assumed (incorrectly) that things will just take care of themselves.

As for the “Process” part of things, well, an internationally respected example is McDonald’s, one of 30 companies on the Dow Jones Industrial average. It shows, among other things, that low prices and good customer service can go together. They’ve obviously created a process that leaves nothing to chance when a customer starts to place an order. It’s not an afterthought. It’s a system.

Now comes “Hierarchy,” and it means having a chain-of-command with ever higher levels of competence that is always within reach of the retail floor. An example of a hierarchy is the floor workers, then a supervisor over them, then a manager over the supervisor.

I once worked where the guy in the next office was our vice president of operations. I’ll just call him the Ops guy. If customer service was falling short in one of our stores, the Ops guy would simply fire the manager, instant-presto. End of story. The Ops guy managed, and he fired, from the top-down, not the bottom-up.

Via that culling process he wound up with a cadre of managers that was the envy of the industry. He could get more done in a one-minute phone call than most folks could accomplish with a brace of meetings and barrage of memos. While many executives make grand shows of long hours in the office, huffing and puffing the live-long day, the Ops guy could smoothly run things via an occasional, and brief, phone call from his Jacuzzi. He often did just that. His managers were razor-sharp. The results showed.

“Dude, how did you find such great people?” I once asked him.

“By firing the bad ones,” he answered.

Speaking of which, so-called “education” didn’t fool the Ops guy. That wasn’t sour grapes; he was Ivy League. But many of his managers were high school dropouts promoted from within the company. Competence was all that mattered. Anyway, adjusting their salaries for inflation, our managers were making about $80,000 a year in today’s dollars; and that wasn’t gray hairs, either, since many of them were about 30 years old.

Well, that cadre of managers wraps back around to the importance of “People,” so the last item on the list is now the first again. Having closed the circle with such elegant flair, it’s time for lunch. If, that is, the waiter will ever show up.

Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at EdStephensJr.com. His column runs every Friday.