As you endeavor to improve the customer experience at your business, you’ll want to do everything you can to ensure that your employees are always delivering their best, most consistent performances possible. In fact, many businesses will develop something like a flowchart for employees to memorize to maintain that consistency. This is so common that several of our own clients request that our mystery shoppers test those steps thoroughly to guarantee compliance. This can be so specific that an employer may want us to check the exact vocabulary the employees use.
For example, a Wall Street Journal discussed how a large consumer electronics company has a policy regarding something called “stop words”—specific words or phrases that they’re not allowed to use. One such word is “unfortunately,” which employees are supposed to replace with “as it turns out.” Thus, an employee wouldn’t say, “Unfortunately, your device has water damage,” but instead would say something like, “As it turns out, your device has water damage.” (The reasoning is that “unfortunately” sounds too negative and may sour a conversation.) Another example would be how a major telecommunications company requires its employees to respond to customer requests and concerns with, “I can help you with that.” This is to be used even when the request is outlandish and the answer is no!
Does this kind of scripted phraseology work? Well, that depends on who you ask. The intent is to make each customer’s experience as positive and productive as possible, no matter which location or employee he or she visits. The biggest problem with scripted language, on the other hand, is that it can lock employees into rigid responses that sound robotic and impersonal. These buzz words and phrases also become more and more obvious to the customer the more he or she comes back. After all, if you operated a restaurant and required all of your waitstaff and hosts to always respond to thank-you’s with, “No—thank you!”, that would become noticeable after a while, right?
When it comes to governing employee interactions with customers, frameworks are usually more useful than scripted language. One such framework that we’ve discussed at length in a previous series of blog posts is GUEST: Greet, Understand, Explain, Secure, and Thank. This framework is relatively broad, allowing improvisation and creativity, but it imposes a set of expectations for the employee. Always greet customers, for example. This doesn’t mean every employee should say something like, “Thank you for being the best part of business. How can I help you today?” That’s going to get repetitive real fast, and lose any semblance of authenticity in the process.
Instead, frameworks usually ask employees to think rather than follow a flowchart. This means you have to hold them to a higher standard, expecting more from their work. This will involve more training, but the result is that you’ll end up with a staff of competent, personable employees who will be completely unique in the competitive landscape. When customers talk about how they like the personal touch of small businesses compared to mega-chains, this is what they really mean.
When you stop to think about it, scripts are a kind of micromanaging. To learn more about balancing the forest with the trees, reach out to The Brandt Group today. We can help you develop the best sales and customer service processes and frameworks for your business, and we can even help with training your employees. Let’s get started!
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