Ersatz Empowerment: The True Cost to Customer Experience #cx
by Kate Nasser | 2 Comments »
Ersatz Empowerment: Customers See Through to the Truth About Your Brand
Ersatz Empowerment: True Cost to Customer Experience. Image by Wonderlane via Flickr.
Study after study shows that employee empowerment is essential for superior customer experience. Complex layers of approvals and silos of solution teams create more than delays. They create breeches of customer trust.
Yet despite the research, leaders still engage in ersatz empowerment that falls short of what’s needed to create superior customer experience.
Ersatz empowerment includes:
- Telling employees they are empowered yet not tooling them with information or technology to act empowered. What does the customer actually experience? Holes and gaps and a vacuum of trust. This lip service to empowerment is not half-way empowerment. It’s ersatz empowerment. It’s zero empowerment. It’s fake and customers can see through it.
- Onboarding employees with procedures without orientation about the organization’s customer service culture. Procedures alone do not empower and they don’t create superior customer service experience. Big picture awareness, knowledge of existing customers, and understanding how and when exceptions are made empowers employees to deliver superior customer experience.
- Leaving silos in place that make front line empowerment impossible. It takes cross teambuilding to break down silos. Front liners can’t do it alone. Without leaders changing the culture, you have ersatz empowerment at the front line that fills the customer with mistrust about your brand.
- Believing that customer service skills are inborn. They aren’t in most people. Customer service training is a vital mechanism for empowerment. It empowers the employee with professional skills to step outside of their own perspective and into the customers’ mindsets. It gives them essential ways to build a thick skin and a warm heart for difficult moments. It reduces the number of times they must escalate incidents to management. This is true empowerment.These are trust building moments with customers and they make or break superior customer experience.
So what’s the true cost of ersatz empowerment to customer experience?
It’s more than just delays to resolving customer issues. It’s more than just customer frustration.
The true cost of ersatz empowerment is loss of customer trust. Customers translate all of the holes, gaps, delays, and frustration to one powerful feeling:
You don’t care therefore I don’t trust you.
This is a very avoidable catastrophe. Create a culture of customer service excellence with truly empowered employees. Give them training, tools, big picture awareness, knowledge of customers, and collaborative engagement.
Replace fake ersatz empowerment with a trust building organization that will outstrip the competition and sustain itself for decades to come.
I’m here to help you! Let’s talk soon about the steps to empowering your customer service and customer experience teams.
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™
Related Posts:
True Customer Experience Leadership: Breed Initiative Beyond Procedures
Customer Experience Vibe: Is Yours Generous Or Greedy?
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Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.
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