How Much Does Employee Empowerment Cost?

One group of Front Line Service Employees (FLSE’s) that I sometimes fail to consider is the team of call-center workers many companies employ. My thoughts turned to this unique group of employees after reading the article “Bath & Body Works: 360 Degrees Is the Best View Into a Customer” in the January/February issue of 1 to 1 Magazine¹ which is put out by the Peppers and Rogers Group. I found one quote spoken by Pati Crowley, Director of Customer Experience for B&BW, to be particularly insightful:

“[W]e are not bound to a monthly budget in terms of goodwill.”

Wow. Take that one to your store manager. These words should be recited daily by FLSE’s, managers, and executives. Read the quote again. Let it really sink in.

The essence of this quote (and its original context in the article) pertains to employee empowerment, one of Dr. Brown’s favorite topics to discuss in my services marketing class a couple years back. Crowley says that B&BW’s one-time “complaint department,” now “brand asset” has been empowered to the extent that agents can give coupons, discounts, and even gift cards to disgruntled callers.

The result? “Customer advocacy and positive word of mouth.” (read: more money)

Without going into great detail, the article seems to isolate 3 traits of the FLSE-empowering, customer-centric model advocated by B&BW (which resulted in their winning of a 1 to 1 Impact Award):

• Purpose-driven responsibility- “Agents are empowered to solve a customer’s problem with up to $25 per call…if a customer has a pain point, our goal is to put them back in the store and to change whatever that experience was.”
• Comprehensive training- ” …contact center agents contribute significantly to the customer experience, so each agent is trained just like in-store associates.” (emphasis added)
• Appropriate technology- “Crowley and her team can track customer feedback, as well as report and analyze in-depth customer trends.”

While these few traits are not intended to be a cure-all for ailing FLSE’s, they are a great place to begin. It’s tough for managers and execs to relinquish the control necessary to make this work, but finding the proper balance may lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty down the line, and it will definitely lead to a more customer-centric organization top, down.

¹ Glagowski, Elizabeth. “Bath and Body Works: 360 Degrees Is the Best View Into the Customer.” 1 to 1 Magazine January/February 2007: 28-29.

Rebranding Opportunity: Relinquished

Rebranding is risky. But when the opportunity arises, and rebranding truly needs to happen, relinquishing the opportunity to do so may doom a brand to stagnancy.

The city of Tulsa, Oklahoma may very well have relinquished this opportunity when it shot down a fraction of a penny tax to be allotted for development along one of Tulsa’s most valuable natural resources, the Arkansas River.

As a native Tulsan (I was born in the pink St. Francis hospital on Yale), I have had to listen to jabs from other states’ cities for as long as I can remember. “Conservative” is the label that has been inexorably tied to our state. Sounds good. Safe. Moral. Unoffensive. Quiet. Meek. Dependable. Unchanging. Predictable. Dull. Entrenched. Unglamorous. Immobile. Inflexible. Afraid. Anti-progressive.

Sad.

Fortunately, our current mayor, Kathy Taylor, is forward-thinking enough to see beyond this roadblock. My guess is, she knew that the same mindset that has caused Tulsa to languish for decades would effectively put an end to this local rebranding initiative. My guess is she’s already thinking about what to do next.

As we know in marketing, position and brand are not created so much as they are imputed upon a company (or city); a culmination of first-impressions, reputation, and consistency (see my formula here). And a sound brand requires a serious, significant investment. The adage “you get what you pay for” is particularly true in this context. Fortunately, there are uneasy, fidgety entrepreneurs in Tulsa who will keep introducing opportunities for Tulsa to rebrand. Hopefully next time, as a city, we will embrace the opportunity.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Recent Customer Experience Anecdotes

The Good

My brother’s wedding was this past weekend. Two positive customer experiences came from it. First, because one of my duties was to prepare a CD full of reception music, I was able to try Amazon’s new MP3 download feature. It was nearly flawless. I lost a couple for no apparent reason (but at 89¢  apiece, I wasn’t too worried-it’s a lot cheaper than Apple’s $200 early-adopter fee, which I considered this to be), and it would have been helpful if I could have put all downloads into a bin (you know, shopping-cart-style) rather than having 25 individual downloads that my bank called me about the next day. But overall, I was really impressed by the painlessness of the process (dare I say, it was even easier than the MP3 purchases I’ve made on iTunes). The second “Good” arose from every wedding’s guarantee that one of the groomsmen’s tuxes absolutely has to be wrong. My brother’s wedding was not immune to this guarantee, but after a quick call to the Men’s Wearhouse in Springfield, MO an employee actually drove out to the chapel to deliver the correct vest personally.

The Bad

Before said trip, the family and I stopped off at McDonald’s on the way out. Despite  answering specific questions posed to me by the drive-thru order-taker, the drive-thru order-deliverer failed to, uh, deliver. I’m speaking specifically about the condiments (strawberry jelly, etc.). The result: multiple knocks on the drive-thru window before I got what I had requested and a long line of angry patrons lined up behind me-and some syrup that we didn’t ask for. By the way, when did drive-thrus stop giving people napkins?

The Ugly

Some would say it had to happen: Zecco.com is doing away with free transactions. This change applies to those with less than $2,500 in their Zecco account. I’m not relegating this to The Ugly section because I’m mad that they will start charging me personally for trades (although secretly, I really am); I’m more  indignant about the change from a marketing standpoint. You see, Zecco had cornered the market. They were the only ones who were doing this. They were unique. When people spoke of Zecco, others knew that they were not just some nameless, budget online-trading company. Zecco had an advertising claim that no one else did.  No one else could claim that they had instituted a “complete re-think of the industry and a dedication to a minimalist business model” (taken from “The Zecco Story”). But now, they’re just like any other ScottTrade, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, or any other company who claims to offer cheap (not free) trades and freebies for clients with  more invested. They are now a commodity. Some bitter customers may even lose trust in Zecco altogether, chalking this up to a promotional scheme at best and a bait and switch program at worst. In light of the fact that Zecco’s trading tools are quite rudimentary and are inferior to other commodity, budget, online trading companies’ tools, combined with the fact that they offer very few value-added initiatives (not to mention, the customer service department ain’t great-stories for another time), all which were easily overlooked by clients since they offered free trades, I believe that this will ultimately hurt Zecco. I’m sure that it was challenging for Zecco to keep things free, but the novelty (and the advertising-viewing eyes of Zecco’s loyal) may have been worth it.