Communicating with customers

Modern customer service needs to balance remoteness with empathy. Wouldn't it be easier, organisations thought, if we simply recruited people who were good at relationships and systems, so they could form a bond with the customer while ticking off the boxes that we use to measure them? So much easier than trying to train and manage the diverse range of people we employ currently!

Ah, but then the ugly head of profiling reveals its second face. Profiling works if you know exactly what you are looking for and can frame questions that discover those qualities. Sadly, profiling is never done with complete knowledge of future needs, nor is it proof against people projecting a version of themselves that they are unable to deliver in the workplace.

So now there are organisations with perfectly defined procedures and a staff totally aligned behind the key behaviours ... and then there comes the realisation that the procedures do not anticipate all eventualities, nor are the staff able to deal with the diversity of customers that they come across. What is more dangerous is that any office community that is formed around common behavioural traits is less likely to notice or appreciate different traits in customers: the common and championed values are constantly reinforced and customer behaviour is translated into those values, so any failure to provide a service is seen as a shortfall, not a wrong direction. Do all customers want a friendly and flexible service? Or do some want to exercise a measure of control; do some want to see timetables and nothing else; do some not really care as long as its done? It all needs more flexibility in the system and more individual accountability from the service providers.

The process of individualisation is a cultural thing. As Gellner wrote, it is not a birthright, but a cultural construct needing constant reinvestment. Perhaps the education of youth is not providing all that is necessary, in which case the human resources departments of organisations become an essential part of life-long learning - not in the search for accreditation or the acquisition of new skills, but in the gradual exposure to dealing with diversity that explores the potential in all of us to be more human.