Motivate Your Customer-Experience Team

Outstanding customer experience requires motivated, empowered frontline employees. To engage your customer-experience team and motivate them to provide an exceptional customer experience:

• Hire for attitude, not aptitude — and then reinforce attitude. To get friendly service, hire friendly people. Recruit frontline staff with a natural service bent by conducting group interviews. Seeing how applicants interact with one another will help you assess their communication and people skills.

• Focus on purpose, not rules. Rules are necessary, but they go only so far. To motivate employees and give meaning to their work, define your company’s purpose: a succinct explanation of the intended customer experience that resonates at an emotional level. When you set clear expectations and trust your people to do their jobs, they’ll feel valued and empowered – and they’ll go that extra mile through passion, not compliance.

Adapted from “The Secret to Delighting Customers” by Dilip Bhattacharjee, Bruce Jones, and Francisco C. Ortega.