KateNasser.com

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:

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1. Showing anger and dissatisfaction; they can’t.
2. Receiving help; they give it and often don’t get help from other teams.
3. Participating in industry conferences; they rarely see the light of day.
4. Attending training for professional growth; they have limited access.
5. Having time to work projects completely; they are expected to perform well while simultaneously clearing the queue.
6. Working a regular schedule with holidays and weekends off; they often work shifts or are on-call.
7. 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.

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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.

Leaders, you and your direct reports have great impact on attracting and keeping top talent. Though you might think it’s only about the money, it isn’t.

There are many behaviors that drive talent away. Talent includes full time employees, contractors, consultants, and even suppliers.

You as leaders and your directors and managers can attract and retain top talent by replacing behaviors that secretly repel them.

Image by: Dee_Gee via Creative Commons License


Behaviors repel talent for any of three reasons:

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QL: They seriously reduce quality of life or
BS: They make it unnecessarily difficult to succeed or
$$: They indirectly cost the talent money.


Replace These 5 Behaviors to Attract Top Talent

1. Highly disorganized or uncertain. Top talent blossoms when leaders set a clear vision. Wandering through a disorganized morass when deadlines loom, leaves talent wondering if success is possible. They envision more attractive opportunities and yearn for success. Replace disorganization and uncertainty with valuable vision.




2. Negativity. Top talent wants to hear what is possible. They feed off of a reality of belief, ideas, and action. Negativity drains their spirit for they see it as unnecessary difficulty. Replace this drain with energy and a call to action.




3. Perfectionism. Top talent see this as a triple whammy. It always comes across as unnecessary stress, it reduces the quality of their work life, and it costs them money. How? By reducing the time they can spend learning or accomplishing other valuable tasks or opportunities. Replace the scourge of perfectionism with the goal of excellence. What a difference!




4. Fear of failure. It produces behaviors that demoralize others. Even if you as leaders aren’t afraid, those that report to you may be. If you love to delegate, do it wisely. Replace delegation based on occupational skill with delegation based on inspirational leadership ability. Otherwise, top talent will move on to work with project managers and directors who aren’t stuck in fear.




5. Me-itis. Top talent tend to love a confident humble leader. Non-confident self-absorbed leaders drive top talent from the organization like a fire alarm. Replace the engineered comfort of me-itis with a belief in what the top talent can produce for the organization and thus for you.

Attracting top talent today is quite different than years ago. There was a time when casting doubt about a talent’s skill would make them work harder to prove you wrong and win out over other talent you are considering.

Though there is still some talent who respond that way, there is top talent who will walk away from you and toward positive inspirational leaders that embrace their talent.

Replace competition with collaboration and doubt with a coalition for success!

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What other behaviors would you add to this list? What other leadership traits attract top talent?


From professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 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.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, customer service, customer experience, and teamwork. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

When has fear kept you stuck in a rut? At a fork in the road in your career? When your business stagnates in a bad economy? In a dead end situation that others tell you to leave?

As a coach, I hear clients describe their ruts. Fear has them stuck like gum on a shoe. Meanwhile one single step can remove the gum and get them moving.

When you want success, know you must change yet feel stuck, don’t let fear be the gum on your shoe.

Break free by finding people who have been through something similar — who no longer have gum on their shoes of course — who will share the steps that got the gum off their shoes!

It sounds obvious and here’s the logic.

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1. Fear of taking a step is lessened by learning from those who have survived the step.
2. Fear of the unknown is countered by those who now know the unknown.
3. Fear of acting oddly during the change turns to knowing smiles when you hear how they felt and behaved.
4. Fear of being wrong crumbles under the evidence of their experience.
5. Fear of being alone on the journey is eliminated when you travel it through their success.

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Well established support groups and their members thrive on these principles. Still many people have issues not defined by any established support group.

Fear not. Online chatters, social media friends, bloggers, authors, and professional coaches all have life experiences to share.

My graphics designer, Kimb Tiboni, has chronicled her Illogical Success with personal insight and real life experiences. I have overcome business hurdles and gained inspiration through friends, coaches, and Twitter chats.


Take one step now and leave your story in the comments section below:

One rut you broke out of and how you did it and/or

One rut you want to break out of and two answers you seek.

You want success? Don’t let fear be the gum on your shoe! Reach out and step forward in your life, career, and business.


What stops people from reaching out — when it’s so obvious that it is key to success?

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™


©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

This year for National Customer Service Week, I ask each of you to look behind every customer.

For a moment, don’t look at metrics, scripts, forms, procedures, the structure, the flashing queue light, the long line, or the clock. Look behind every customer to discover the true need, the future, and success. Our future is behind every customer.

Graphic by: Kimb Manson


Customer Service – Stripped to the Core

1. Behind every customer is the unknown yearning to be known. That’s our future of customer loyalty.

Empathize!



2. Behind every customer ID number, is a person with a name whose needs we can fulfill. That’s our future. That’s success.

Ask for their name before their ID number!



3. Behind every customer question – odd, crazy, simplistic, or repetitive — is a chance to move them to the future and success.

Listen with an open mind!



4. Behind every customer is another person whom we impact with our actions. Our care is growth for both. That’s our future and theirs.

Follow-through!



5. Behind every impatient customer is our future success with the tough times of life. That’s a future of skill and ability.

Study up!



6. Behind every customer are the factors that define great service to them. Look behind the customer to reach that future.

It’s a one-to-one match!



7. Behind every customer is limitless potential. Cultivate the future.

Go to the well!



8. Behind every customer is the heart of our success. It beats for our future.

Maintain heart health!



9. Behind every customer is a wealth of knowledge free for the taking. Learn!

Is there a #10? What would you add to this list?


Lead the future of customer loyalty …

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Listen
Emapthize
Assess
Deliver

Don’t leave it behind!

Offer: Subscribe to this Smart SenseAbilities™ blog and download your thank you gift poster of Our Future is Behind Every Customer. Print it and hang in your customer service area for continued inspiration!

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers consulting, training, DVDs, and keynotes for customer service and teamwork — that turn interaction obstacles into business success especially in tough times of change. See this site for workshops outlines and customer results.

With ONE Simple Question!

Leaders, managers, investors, parents, and coaches, are often realizing and mentoring someone’s big dream.

The bigger and more outlandish the dream, the greater the disbelief and concern.  This doubt can produce unhelpful reactions like “what are you thinking” or “it sounds too risky”.

Yet there is ONE simple question that powers success with both inspiration and practicality.

The ONE Simple Question

“What do you picture?”

This questions powers positive inquiry, broader and deeper perspective, dialogue, and research. It unearths understanding of:

1. What does the dreamer think it will take to make the dream a reality?
2. How complete or accurate is that picture?
3. What strengths and how much endurance does the dreamer have?
4. What obstacles does the dreamer foresee – internal and external?
5. How will the dreamer handle missteps and mistakes – psychologically and practically?
6. What help, truly, does the dreamer expect?

What do you picture is a far better question that what is your plan? The latter requires great foresight of details at the start yet doesn’t assess the dreamer’s true readiness.

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For leaders and managers with a tough career slot to fill, knowing the applicant’s vision of that job is critical to a successful decision.

For parents with wide-eyed teenagers or high achieving college students, asking what do you picture encourages them to consider their dream more deeply without killing their spirit.

For investors in new inventions, knowing how the inventor thinks and pictures the future will affect the win or lose.

For coaches, this one simple question — what do you picture – sets up a positive non-directive dialogue with those they coach.

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There will be time for plans and details. Yet if you skip the picture and go right to the plan, the plan will be incomplete. It will lack success factors that are found within the dreamer not within the plan.

Have you tried this question — what do you picture? What was the result and response?


From my experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach


©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, guides people from inspiration to action. Her workshops, consultations, keynotes, and DVDs, turn interaction obstacles into interpersonal success and business wins. View footage, keynote topics, workshop outlines, and customer results at this site.

Picture a decision maker about to decide who will be the one. It might be a leader about to delegate responsibility, a hiring manager interviewing job applicants, or an executive doing succession planning.

What will sway that decision maker to pick you to be the one? Beyond specific qualifications, a clear demonstration of optimism and realism could tip the scale your way.

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” ~William Arthur Ward

The optimism in you will:

1. Inspire innovation and propel success
2. See possibilities that others don’t
3. Encourage and lift others up
4. Strengthen the resolve and commitment
5. Energize during the last mile of the journey

The realism in you will:

1. Minimize risk by identifying and rejecting the truly impossible
2. See the struggle and overcome it
3. Know when to adjust course and do it
4. Build strengths and counter-strengths to ensure success

When you have both optimism and realism, you outshine others that otherwise equal you in qualifications.

This duo makes you valuable in varied careers and roles:
As a leader, you will inspire to action.
As a sales rep, you will dream big and deliver.
As a project manager, you will master the details yet the details will not become your master.

In truth, optimism and realism make you valuable in any career. What examples would you add to this list to showcase the value and power of having both?

We often think of that certain people as optimists and others as realists. Yet these traits are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to develop both optimism and realism with astonishing results for your career and the organization.

To strengthen your realism, spend time with realists (not pessimists). Ask them what about practical suggestions and alternatives makes them feel comfortable. Then ask yourself, what about realism disillusions or blocks you? In the intersection of this discussion is the path to your development.

To heighten your optimism,
-Start each day by reading an inspirational thought or viewing a short 2 minute video like The Power of Attitude or The Nature of Success. Inspirational thoughts and videos are the tangible expression of optimism.

-If just the thought of doing this makes you cringe, watch a video just once and then write down what about the lack of details makes you so uncomfortable.

- Write down one positive result you have seen at work when others are inspired. After that if optimism still doesn’t move you, you may develop and embrace it just to tangibly lead others to the same place you are going — success.

I was inspired to write this post after participating in a chat on Twitter — BeTheOne — founded and hosted by Mark Sturgell (@pdncoach) and Bridget Haymond (@BridgetHaymond).

Kudos to their optimism to see the possible value and realism to make it happen. Join the Be The One chat the first Saturday of every month to develop both.

I wish you the strength and success of this balance,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach


©2011 Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, Founder & President, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you would like to re-post or re-publish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers inspiration to action in keynotes, workshops, consultations, and DVDs on teamwork, customer service, communicating across diversity, and leading change. See this site for examples of the success she has fueled.

Twenty years of planning and delivering customer service training have produced this advice for leaders. You can do much to ensure and extend the value of any expert customer service training.

Make the training stick and create a new movement for the ultimate customer service experience with these steps.

Extend Value of Customer Service Training. Image by:KimbManson Graphics

STEP #1. Before selecting any training, write down what you want your customers to experience. Use customer feedback and your business goals in this process.  Communicate with all leaders and staff — not just the customer service front line.  Look for and resolve the discrepancies in the definition. If you are not of one mind, training participants will interpret and use the skills purely from their own definition.

STEP #2. Prepare your staff on how to learn from an expert. Customer service staff often develop an emotional attachment to the way they have handled customers — especially the challenging situations. They hold onto their methods as a life vest or buoy yet these methods are more protective of them than helpful to the customers. A simple statement from you at the beginning of the training — encouraging them to open up to the expert’s experience — is very effective!

STEP #3. Be the initial champion of the movement to improve customer service. Communicate what you expect of all staff in making the ultimate customer service experience come to life. Why should staff change behavior if you aren’t exhibiting this commitment and importance of the change?

STEP #4. After-session visual reminders of the skills are standard and effective. Visual reminders of customer service spirit and the ultimate customer experience turn the inspiration generated during training into a customer service movement. Shirts, buttons, signs, daily start huddles, peer coaching, frequent use of customer feedback, weekly lessons learned, and celebrating commitment, make the skills come to life every day.

If staff strongly resist this last step, you may be facing either a deeper morale issue or a reflection of your leadership style. Perhaps you have created a democracy rather than empowered teams all working toward the organization’s vision and goals.

To extend the value of training, develop a culture of visible spirit and learning. It inspires, engages, and encourages teams to deliver the ultimate customer service experience.

What other steps have you taken to create a highly effective customer service culture?

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, is widely respected for her insight, expertise, and skill in inspiring and delivering advice and training for the ultimate customer service experience. See this site for what others have said about the training and for workshop outlines.

Research and articles report that people skills, also known as soft skills, are critical skills for today’s business success. They claim that the hard skills, (occupational skills), are not enough. Interpersonal skills, communication excellence, ability to inspire diverse people and build high performance teams are where it’s at!

It then begs the question: Leaders, do you really promote people based on their excellent people skills? Or are you still tempted to promote someone to a leadership position based on their occupational prowess?

Leaders often find themselves in this dilemma partly because they think of people skills as soft skills.  Is this thinking a legacy of the industrial revolution?  Leaders’ definitions of success were very closely tied to technological progress (even before the computer).

This thinking can be dangerous in an era where innovation, creativity, and capturing diverse talents are the pathway to business success. People skills are not soft.  People skills prowess is a complex and refined ability to inspire people to produce hard tangible results. It materializes in communication, team dynamics, and leadership that taps and blends global talents for an innovative competitive edge.

Most everyone agrees that the ideal leader would have: outstanding people skills, great vision, critical thinking prowess, as well as the ability to inspire innovation/change, assess and take risks, market, and easily understand the financials.  If this ideal candidate is not available, which skills would you primarily seek?  Whom would you select?  Why?

I advise many leaders to look for the following tangible people-skills when promoting staff:

1. How does the staff interact with leaders, colleagues, other team members, and outsiders?
2. What evidence do you have of that staff inspiring teamwork, innovation, and collaboration?
3. When the staff communicates, does s/he use open ended questions to invite discussion, listen reflectively, and also clearly state his/her own opinions?
4. What have you witnessed in the staff that tells you this person thrives in diversity and change?
5. How well have they led global virtual teams? What were the results?

I welcome a lively and civil discussion on this topic and invite you to leave your thoughts in the comments section below. What advice would you share with leaders on how to find the best staff to promote?

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach delivers workshops, keynotes, consults and coaching on the people-skills for teamwork, customer service, and sales.  20 years of experience feeds her new sessions and your success.  For more information and what others say about her work, see this site.

One of the more recent workplace concepts is employee engagement. Wikipedia notes, Employee engagement can be seen as a heightened level of ownership where each employee wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of their internal and external customers and for the success of the organization as a whole.

Most everyone would agree that the business results of engaged employees are positive. The question is: How much time and energy should businesses spend to ignite this employee engagement and do you expect employees to keep the engagement going once you light the fire?

Great leaders inspire. They have engaged employees. Yet great leaders also expect engagement from employees. They avoid the mistake of becoming the perennial entertainer who sees lapses in employee engagement when they are not entertaining.

As a consultant, leaders bring me in to help light the fire for employee engagement. Often they ask me when engagement is low. My success in re-igniting the fire in various organizations for 20 years includes the steps noted below. As a leader, you can use this approach to do the same.

1. Highlight unique talents. Have the employees identify their unique talents. Share your view of it as well. An employee initiates and sustains engagement when s/he believes they make a unique contribution or difference.




2. Identify the impact of their efforts and their lack of effort. A common problem among employees is limited sight distance. They fall into the rut of daily routine and become more and more detached from the big picture. Use specifics from the business instead of generalities.




3. Handle the chronic complainers (aka perennial naysayers). There is nothing wrong with intelligent disagreement nor with venting some negative emotion. Employees are people not robots. Yet chronic complainers and naysayers have a strong erosive effect on employee engagement. They do not contribute ideas, innovation, nor solutions. Over time they stop others’ who would otherwise engage yet who no longer want to engage and interact with the complainers.




4. Focus on and recognize learning. When you build a learning culture, you breed long term employee engagement and long term organizational success. Learning from mistakes. Learning about customers. Learning about themselves and each other. Learning how to deal with seemingly unfair conditions and turn them into huge successes. Build pride in doing tough jobs well!




5. Have a zero tolerance for lack of engagement. An employee chooses to work for you and get paid. Engagement is expected. Great leaders quickly address lack of engagement with a clear statement of what is expected and with openness and discussion on how to make it happen. They do not debate if it should happen and don’t get sidelined with endless discussions of obstacles, barriers, and complaints.

What other steps are in your critical plan for employee engagement?


©2010 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, is widely known for her success inspiring zealous employee commitment and engagement in diverse industries. See this site for what leaders and other session participants have said and accomplished with Kate’s contributions.

National Customer Service Week 2010 is coming to an end yet the endless demand for superior customer service lives on.  I continue to learn and build my expertise even after 20 years of working with customers across multiple industries.  To honor all who work with customers, I share the following insights to retool, refuel, and revive your spirit even on the toughest day.  I believe you will find inspiration in them for training the best technical support analysts and customer service reps.

In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want. ~ALICE MACDOUGALL

Inspiration for Training the Best

1. Procedures and protocols can block listening. Life is not a protocol. Business is not a protocol. Customers don’t fit into protocols; they build our business. Listen and adapt to them!




2. Compete against yesterday’s high point — not against each other. Some team members are motivated by competition. Replace competition between team members with competition against yesterday’s best service. Beat that everyday and watch service and teamwork soar.




3. Impact beats intention. A Twitter colleague and employee engagement expert, Ava Diamond, wrote that intent does not equal impact. In customer service, I go further and say impact beats intent. Your words and actions must have a positive impact! Your intentions are of little value when the impact of your words was negative.




4. An authentic smile changes everything. Yes, customers can tell when you authentically care and the smile (in person, on the phone, in online chat) is the window to that caring.




5. Being positive to thorny customers does not teach them to be ruder next time. A technical support analyst asked me “Why does a difficult customer deserve to be treated well when s/he is acting badly? Read the answers here … 5 Things to Think With Difficult & Rude Customers.




6. Empathize before you analyze. Verbalizing empathy and commitment to the customer paves a smoother road to problem solving.




7. Kindness Transcends Constraints. A blog post by The Knowledge Bishop reminds all that kindness to the customer keeps the loyalty bond alive while you work to solve the customer’s problem.




8. Scripts are a monologue. The best customer service is a dialogue.




9. Personalize and localize for legendary service. When a customer gives you her/his name, use it when speaking to them. Else you are treating them like a data point. Secondly, learn, understand, and adapt to a customer’s culture. Here’s one positive step in that direction: Regional Differences in American Customers – What They Expect!

What would be your #10 for this list? It could be your original thought or a favorite quote. Leaders, share this list with your team as an inspirational exercise and have them create #10!

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach and customer service guru, continues on in her 21st year of inspiring teams in customer service and sales to transform their daily work to a constant celebration of success with customers. Her workshop Delivering the Ultimate Customer Experience is one you won’t want to miss!

Individual strengths and teamwork are not at odds with each other. In fact, they are innately connected.  Why then do so many leaders think that appreciating individual strengths will hurt teamwork?

This is an important issue in this time of asking people at work to do more with less. Study after study shows that appreciation/recognition is the one key thing management can do to inspire and motivate effort and performance – http://fb.me/HgG7O52r.

Leaders, you could argue that the appreciation could be given to the whole team and not the individuals. Yes that is true.  Yet, you run the risk of the appreciation sounding shallow and repetitious if it lacks specifics.

You could argue that the individual appreciation could be given in private and team kudos in public. Yes that is true.  Yet it cheats the entire team out of the chance to:

1. Participate in building a culture of identifying and appreciating the strengths that individuals contribute to the team’s results
2. Learn what individual strengths exist on the team for future success and
   
3. Witness the joy that their individual teammates experience when honored for their strengths.
   

As a leader, what can you do to ensure that individual appreciation won’t hurt teamwork?

1. Honor diversity. Don’t fall into the trap of honoring only those individuals who are very much like you.
   
2. Highlight how the individual strengths contributed to the team’s results.
3. Recognize both the individual strengths on tasks and also on the interpersonal skills which contribute to the team’s results.
4. Applaud the effort of all who blended the individual strengths into team results.

What else helps the team value each individual’s strengths as well as the total results? Or do you think that this is all very risky? I welcome your comments below.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers transformational team building workshops and advice that empower you to remove teamwork obstacles — big and small. See this site for more information http://katenasser.com.

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Customer care, the true sense of wanting to help customers, is a subject that has intrigued me for many years.   Why do I feel so much inspiration to care for customers?

You might immediately think personality type. Maybe some types are more innately inspired to care for customers. Yet, I am not an amiable on the personality scale.  In fact, I have seen many different personality types working quite well in customer care.

Maturity? I have always felt the inspiration to care even as a teenager with summer jobs.  Money?  Well, summer jobs didn’t pay much. In fact, read the myriad of blog articles that claim CSRs are demotivated because they don’t get paid enough to care.  (I don’t agree with that one.)

Well I have spent much of my professional life inspiring customer service and tech support reps to care for customers. Leader after leader has asked me the same question, “How can we motivate our reps to deliver better customer care?”.   One day, I heard the same question again. This time it hit me that the obstacle the leader faced was not the reps — it was the concept of motivation.

Motivation

The concept of motivation conjures up images of offering comp days if they consistently reach their metrics or scheduling a pizza party if they clear the backlog in the email queue. There is nothing inherently wrong with offering these carrots to accomplish a short term goal. It will not, however, create consistently high quality customer care. The effect of the motivator wears off the same way an advertisement loses its marketing/sales effectiveness over time. It no longer motivates.

Inspiration

On the other hand, inspiration is something deep inside your reps and consistently there. The actual feeling varies in each person. Here is a short list of inspiration points I have tapped in thousands of reps over the years. You will notice a common thread. Inspiration is integral to what makes the individual rep naturally feel good.  What would you add to this list?

1. Making a difference in the customer’s life that day. To do that, the reps need to be empowered to actually help.   Reading from scripts and having to pass all exceptions to a supervisor is not inspirational.
2. Seeing how their work contributes to the company and the customer’s success. A director of customer services recently told me that their initial attempt at training reps included a product manager delivering a Powerpoint presentation on the products.  She was in the back of the room and saw the reps disengaging, looking around, swiveling their chairs.   She decided to redo the customer service reps training program and had them actually touching the products, installing them, and so forth.  The results were amazing.  In fact, the results were inspired!
3. Living what it feels like to be a customer.
4. Enjoyment and fun. There are people who begin to care about others when they feel good themselves. It doesn’t have to be constant fun — life rarely is. Yet if there is no fun, these reps will not be inspired to give more.
5. Respect for their individual talents. Perhaps one of the most common inspiration points is people being known and respected for their individual talents — at least in our American culture. In eastern philosophies/cultures, this is not necessarily the case.

©2010 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, is an inspirational and activational speaker and trainer in customer service and teamwork. Her years of experience, her natural intuition about people, and passion for people-skills always take your organization to a higher level of performance.  See her video footage on this site.

Career and life transitions are difficult for many people. For some — downright scary. People feel they can no longer be who they are nor are they sure of what their life will become.

So what happens? They resist career and life changes. Wrong move for sure. There’s an easier way to transition to your new career and life goals. Need a little inspiration and guidance for the impending changes and transition?

Here’s one of my two minute motivators including music. It inspires and teaches lessons learned from my three career changes and even more transitions.  Change really doesn’t have to be so hard!

Remember, people change when the fear/risk of changing is less than the fear of staying the same. So take inspiration from this two minute motivator and replace your fear with the easier way.

After you watch this two minute motivator,  add your insights and transition stories in the comments field below.  I also welcome your questions.  I am here to help as a coach or as the speaker at your next event.

~Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach

This is a new ongoing blog post to collect and share great practical tips on starting the week off with a positive pop!! Here are just a few starting tips.  Please add your comments below so we can get this rolling.  

If you are on Twitter, chat (tweet) on Motivate Mondays with # so others can find it.  If you are not on Twitter, join up and follow me (@katenasser) and @Help_NewTweeps to get going more quickly.

Motivate Mondays: Tips to inspire a great start of the week:

• Sunday, have fun during the day, get organized in the evening, and sleep happy at night.
• Plant a big smile on your face as you go to work.  Let your actions control your feelings not the reverse.
• Do something different at work on Monday morning.  It will change the entire week.
• Ask your teams and colleagues: What will we learn this week?  Because you change how you start the week, your week will take a new and different path.

Inspiring yourself and others has great rewards.  It changes your thinking.  It changes your outlook.  It changes what happens around you because of your actions to try something different and change.

Please contribute a Motivate Mondays tip below.  We grow and change by listening and learning from others.

Kate Nasser

http://katenasser.com