I am often asked what I mean by ‘Customer Service Culture’. What I mean is that everyone in an organisation, no matter what size the organisation is, is dedicated to customer service and knows what their role is in providing excellent customer service. Many years ago, I was a customer service professional on the railway. An edict came out from ‘on high’ that we had to start standing on the platform at stations, greeting our customers. I guess they stole that idea from the airlines, who had been doing it for years, but the instruction stirred up a real hornet’s nest in the part of the railway I worked on, the East Coast Main Line between London and Scotland. Why? Because none of our managers ever showed the remotest inclination to change their behaviour, but we, the front line staff, were expected to do their bidding.
I didn’t have any real objection to standing on the platform at King’s Cross and greeting my passengers as they joined the train. I thought I would give it a go, and after several mornings of standing there saying ‘Good morning’ and trying to smile, my hard work paid off. A passenger said ‘Good morning’ back! However, I was an exception to the rule, and it took many months before the staff on the trains started greeting their passengers as a matter of course, and many of them did it unwillingly and through gritted teeth, especially on cold mornings!
Why was this? Well, one reason might have been that there wasn’t a Customer Service Culture on the railways in those days. I’m talking about the early 1990’s here, and it’s much the same now. After a great start in the early days of privatisation in the mid 1990’s, customer service on the railways has gone back to what it was like in British Rail days. That’s because only the people in the front line are seen as being responsible for customer service. If you speak to people in support functions, such as Procurement, Finance, IT and even HR, they do not see a direct line between what they do and how it impacts on customer service.
A really good way of changing that is for people in support functions (and let’s face it, everyone from the cleaner to the CEO is a support function) to spend some real quality time in the front line. By that, I mean, go and spend a whole day, once a month, working with the front line people and asking them what they need from your department – and then going away and making some changes. ‘Back to the Floor’ days for ‘top’ people are popular, but most of them are just window-dressing – the people who perform ‘Back to the Floor’ exercises often go back to their plush offices and nothing much changes. If you have a story of how a ‘Back to the Floor’ exercise has resulted in lasting change for the better within an organisation I’d love to hear from you!
Picture credit: djwerdna