Lesson five, influencing your team to go above and beyond. So this is a short one, but it's really inspired by a fairly small incident that happened to me, it just got me thinking about customer care is helping customers even when what the customer needs is not necessarily in in the area of that the individuals working. So I'll give you an example. And hopefully that will help you understand what I'm talking about. So I've got another story here. It's not a particularly exciting story.

I went to a bookshop recently, and I was looking for something upstairs in the bookshop. So it had two floors, and I was looking through the books and now it wasn't really a customer service thing that happened to me, but I overheard a woman go to an assistant, a shop assistant and ask for something. I didn't really pick up exactly what she said. And the answer was, I Well, you're not in the right place. You need to go downstairs. And she just basically pointed it down the stairs.

And the woman just kind of slightly sheepishly walked down the stairs to try and find what she wanted. Now, it wasn't a terrible thing. It wasn't the sort of thing that, you know, you see in the newspaper as a terrible example of poor customer service. But it got me thinking to things that had happened to me as well in the past where I'd been working with somebody, I've been asking them questions about something, or maybe I'd gone approached somebody and asked them a question. And instead of them coming with me and saying, Come on, I'll take you to where you need to be. They just kind of pointed me in the general direction and told me that I was in the wrong place.

So that's kind of slightly accusatory. I was in the wrong place, and I needed to be somewhere else. And they pointed me to that place, which meant that I was kind of wandering around looking for whatever this right place was hoping that somebody else would pick me up. Yeah, is that right? Really, there's level of customer service that we want. If we want a culture of customer care, we care about the customer, we care about their experience.

So that lady, the bookshop, for me should have said, actually, where you need to be is downstairs, come on, I'll show you where you need to be. And she could have then followed her, pointed in the right direction actually physically took her to the place or even to another shop assistant, who would be able to help. So here's Debbie, she'll be able to help you with what you're looking for. And wouldn't that have been a great level of customer service, a real culture of customer care, instead of left feeling a little bit sorry for it because it was clear that the shopper system didn't really want to be bothered, she was doing something else and this wasn't her area. Anyway, I felt a bit sorry for her and actually thought to myself, you know, that could have been so much better, but this tends to happen quite a lot.

So think about how you can create That culture where the individual thinks, actually I'm gonna take responsibility and go and help that person myself. So going the extra mile. So one of the ways you can do that is by clearly stating the expectations that you will do that. So my expectations are that when you get some situation like that, that you will actually go with the customer and help them find what they're looking for, as opposed to is working in silos, where you know, we mustn't encroach upon that other area. So again, that might require some training, it might require some discussions across departments about how that's going to work. But wherever possible, that might be a way to demonstrate customer care.

There might be a protocol that you can implement. So you might explain that you know, when this happens, then you need to do this. Clearly there are responsibilities that individuals Have that if they stopped doing that, then they've got to do something else. And that has a knock on effect. So there might be a protocol that needs to be considered in a process. Just to make sure that that happens, though, is there a way that you can empower your team members to go that extra mile?

Again, very common on these programs is the idea of positive consequences and feeding back when you observe team members doing it properly. So I just want to say, I noticed what happened earlier on with that customer who was in the wrong place. That was great. I really liked the fact that you went with them to find what they were looking for. And but you also mentioned to search and search to make sure that they minded the area properly while you were gone. So you're just giving the positive feedback about what you're looking for.

Now, of course, if you observe the opposite, if you happen to be the manager, you'd gone through that protocol, you trained it out. you'd stay To your expectations, and you happen to observe what happened in that shop, where the person just kind of slightly irritating, pointed downstairs and said you need to be down there. Of course, at that point, you need to reinforce what needs to be done. So, hi there. I'd like to give you some feedback. And then of course, you can discuss what happened.

You know what happened with that lady during what we said about making sure that you always go with them if they're a bit lost. So you can just remind your team about what's important, this is important to reinforce what it is you're looking for. So we've seen these doors before, similar sort of thing. If on the one hand, we're saying that it's all about a narrow set of key performance indicators, which could be sales or it could be something else around paperwork or the way that things are organized or whatever. It's all about that. Then that's what you're going to get if that's what you give praise for You ignore the other bits about the customer experience, for instance, and the value they see from it, then don't be surprised if that's what you're going to get.

You've created that as a driver. So switch it around. Of course being realistic that there are other things that matter in a business. But if we're focusing on having a culture of customer care, then we need to be encouraging people to go through that door which is all about giving customers the experience that they want in need.