Let Everyone “Get Good At” Engaging With Customers

Everyone knows the scene by heart. You’ve seen it dozens of times, heard it repeated by your friends and probably quoted it a few times yourself. That scene from Office Space where the Bobs are interviewing Tom Smykowski and Bob S. asks him “What would ya say…ya do here?” Remember what happens next? Here’s the exchange that continues after Tom answers and Bob S. is following up, trying to clarify:

BOB S: What you do at Initech is you take the specs from the customer and you bring ’em down to the software engineers?

TOM S: Yes. That’s right.

BOB P: Well, then, I just have to ask, why couldn’t the customers just take em directly to the software people?

TOM S: Well, I’ll tell ya why. Uh, because engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

How many times do we protect team members from having to do things they’re not “good at?” Oh, we probably don’t think about it that way. We think about it more in terms of “job scope” and making sure specialists are not disturbed or distracted from doing the specialized work we hired them to do. Programmers should spend their time programming. Designers designing. Finance people crunching numbers, and so on.

But it’s important to keep in mind that everyone who works in your company is there for one reason: To serve customers. And to do that, they have to “get good at” dealing with, listening to, understanding the needs of — customers.

Nobody starts out being good at anything. That’s no reason to put barriers between team members and the customers they serve. People get good at something by doing it — over and over. I’m not suggesting customers should have an open door during all business hours to everyone in your company, no matter what their job is. I am proposing you look for opportunities to bring the people who design, build and service the products and who perform all the functions that support that effort, into closer contact with customers.

Do you have a customer call-in line that’s staffed by Customer Service Reps? Let the folks from accounting listen in so they can hear directly from customers about the issues they’re having trying to use the product.

How about taking along someone from HR on a sales call?

When it’s time to deliver or install a new system at the client’s place of business, how about letting someone from admin or law accompany your set-up team to see how it’s done and hear the kinds of questions the client asks.

Here are some ways your company will benefit:

• Team members who don’t regularly interact with customers will learn more about the perceived advantages, benefits and shortcomings of the products they support.
• Sales and service folks will get new ideas for doing their jobs better as they get the perspectives of associates from other departments who are on hand to watch and ask questions later about why something was done a certain way or not done at all.
• Customers will benefit from increased empathy for their concerns in various parts of the company who don’t directly interact with them as part of their regular job.
• The company will benefit as more associates are engaged and energized to find new solutions to clients’ problems and challenges.

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been laughing about that scene from Office Space since the movie was released in 1999! Sure, it’s funny to think there could actually be a job in the company whose explicit purpose is to keep engineers from talking to customers. But whether we intend it or not, even many years later, that’s still often the result of our organizational and work flow process and procedures.

There’s so much talk about the need for innovation, we sometimes forget the best way to get ideas is by interacting with customers at the point of sale or service. The more team members we bring into the act, the better for everyone.