For decades, leaders have heard the same outcry from customer service, call center, and technical support teams: “We have to treat the customers well even when they are yelling at us. Why do they get treated better than they treat us?”
Service and support leaders, managers, and team leads ask me: “Kate, how do we counter that? Beyond our efforts to treat team members well, what’s the answer to this endless outcry?”
It depends on what you think the team members seek. If you hear it as an outcry for equality and fairness, you might be tempted to say “because they are the customers” or the old standard “the customer is always right.” Your reply affirms that it is not an equal relationship.
Well fairness and equality may be part of what customer service and tech support teams want. Everyone deserves to be treated with basic human respect and most organizations do not tolerate true verbal abuse on either side.
Nonetheless, the outcry continues.
I can affirm, after 23 wonderful years of training these teams, that the other part of the outcry is envy.
It’s understandable how agents, reps, analysts, and associates could envy the customers’ privilege of:
- Showing anger and dissatisfaction; they can’t.
- Receiving help; they give it and often don’t get help from other teams.
- Participating in industry conferences; they rarely see the light of day.
- Attending training for professional growth; they have limited access.
- Having time to work projects completely; they are expected to perform well while simultaneously clearing the queue.
- Working a regular schedule with holidays and weekends off; they often work shifts or are on-call.
- Being respected and valued; few top leaders recognize service and support as vital to the organization.
Leaders, The Impact of Envy in Customer Service
The risk and impact of this envy is worthy of your attention.
- It stops teams from consistently delivering the ultimate in customer service. If their heads and hearts don’t love being in service, they won’t.
- Unchecked envy emphasizes the feelings of unworthiness and diverts valuable focus from service to the imbalance.
- It impacts the teamwork critical to delivering outstanding service.
- Unaddressed envy can fuel high staff turnover. Some turnover is healthy for service teams. High levels are a warning sign of a service organization in trouble.
Understanding this has given many leaders and me the chance to cultivate a non-envy culture that inspires and delivers service greatness.
Through workshops, we have helped the front line managers, supervisors, team leads, and staff to replace envy of customers’ privileges with pride in:
- Breath of knowledge
- Continuous learning through experience
- Great ease and style in working with people — not everyone has this prowess
- Multi-tasking and ability to work under pressure
- Professional skill of being empathetic and objective — many doctors don’t even have this
- Inspiring yourself and others to excellence
To build and sustain a non-envy service culture, it is necessary to help service team members discover a sense of fulfillment. I rarely hear the cry of envy from service team members who are fulfilled in other ways.
Fulfillment squelches envy whether it comes from their family life, years of work experience, inner peace, gratitude for having a job, comparison to previous jobs, or a tremendous high from reaching results in the face of adversity.
Leaders, showing appreciation and recognition for service team’s work and helping them build a positive service team identity feeds fulfillment. Working with your peer leaders of non-customer facing teams to build the cross teamwork necessary for mutual success feeds fulfillment.
Declare your vision to your teams and ask them for their insight on how to achieve it. Telling does not engage excellence; asking does.
Offer training to develop their professional skills. Budget for temps to cover service demands while service team members present a case study of their achievements at an industry conference.
Face team problems, like envy, stress, and morale, and your teams will achieve success.
I look forward to helping you take your customer service and tech support teams from inspiration to action.
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™
Related Posts:
Leaders, 12 Worthy Kudos to Spark Employee Engagement
The Ultimate Customer Experience – Challenge of Excellence (video with sound)
©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service, customer experience, teamwork, and leading change. For 23 years, she has turned interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer testimonials and results.















