chapter 6

anticipatory customer service
your people

once you’ve defined and codified your culture, what do you need next in order to create anticipatory customer service? You need people—the right people.

Here’s the first thing to know about hiring. Attitude, rather than technical skill, is what’s most important in a prospective employee. Although you’ve probably heard this voiced before as a platitude, it’s a difficult point to actually get across in our technology-obsessed age, but it’s crucial. You can teach technical skills, at least the technical skills needed for customer service situations, to prospective employees who fall within a wide range of technical aptitude. Often, in fact, unlearning poorly taught technical skills is difficult, which is why master technicians and craftsmen in a variety of fields prefer to train from the ground up. The unlearning of anti-customer procedures and policies can also be a real problem when hiring from within your industry. (This issue can be compounded when you inherit employees in an existing physical facility. As Michele Livingston at service-obsessed Umpqua Bank points out, you have to make an extra effort in that situation to get across to legacy employees that more is changing than simply the nameplate on the door.)¹

There’s so much that’s necessary in service that you cannot teach: As Michele’s boss at Umpqua, President and CEO Ray Davis, put it facetiously, “I don’t know what we could have done if we had to teach them [employees] to genuinely like people and want to be helpful or to be enthusiastic about meeting challenges. Could we send them off to class and teach them integrity and caring about the community?”²

My favorite discussion of what makes a service employee great comes again from the philosophical musings of Alain de Botton, discussing British Airways:

The airline’s survival depended upon qualities that the company itself could not produce or control, and was not, strictly speaking, paying for. The real origins of these qualities lay not in training courses or employee benefits but, for example, in the loving atmosphere that had reigned a quarter of a century earlier in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and humour—all so that today, without any thanks being given to those parents … he would have both the will and the wherewithal to reassure an anxious student on her way to the gate to catch BA048 to Philadelphia.³

Now, before you object to my parent-centric determinism, let me beat you to it by objecting myself: I know people with wonderful attitudes who have come from terrible family backgrounds. So in spite of the preceding passage, and the famous comment by Nordstrom’s Bruce Nordstrom, who, when asked “Who really trains the salespeople?” quipped “Their parents do,”⁴ I don’t literally mean to only hire people from great family backgrounds. What I do mean is to hire people who, by the time they reach the age of employment, have come through childhood unscathed, retaining pro-customer, pro-team traits, the innate stuff that more or less can’t be taught. “Most companies hire for experience and appearance, how the applicants fit the company image,” Isadore Sharp of Four Seasons says. “We hire for attitude. We want people who like other people and are, therefore, more motivated to serve them. Competence we can teach. Attitude is ingrained.”⁵

Zappos puts prospective employees through interviews and challenges that fall into two disparate categories: one for basic technical competency and the other for the softer attitude traits the company is looking for. Each of the two is given equal weight. (My suggestion: If you take this dual approach, do the “soft” part first so you don’t get overly swayed, or dismayed, by what you find in the technical part of the prospect’s review. You don’t want to get pumped up about hiring someone for her mad technical skills and then have to muster all manner of willpower to decline that candidate for not being an attitude fit.)

Hire the right people, attitudinally. Train them, technologically. Sounds easy enough, but in all practicality, just how do you do that? For starters, what does the profile of the “right people” look like?

a wet dog at petco

For customer-facing employees, the right people can be identified by my acronym “WETCO” (you’ll never forget this if you picture a big wet dog at Petco):

Warmth: Simple human kindness. Warmth is perhaps the simplest and yet most fundamental of these five personality traits. In essence, it means enjoying our human commonality, flaws and all.

Empathy: The ability to sense what another person is feeling. Empathy is a step up from warmth; empathy moves beyond the plateau of liking other people and is more like reading hearts—the ability to sense what a customer needs or wants, whether or not this desire is even yet apparent to the customer.

Teamwork: An inclination toward “Let’s work together to make this happen” and against “I’d rather do it all myself.” Teamwork is a slightly paradoxical member of the WETCO group of traits. After all, customers need the help of entrepreneurially minded employees who will take charge of the situation without prodding, people who are willing to fix a problem all by themselves, if necessary. But that attitude needs to be seasoned by an inclination to favor a team approach, or your organization will soon suffer from the friction created.

Conscientiousness: Detail orientation, including an ability and willingness to follow through to completion. Conscientiousness is a key trait for successfully serving customers, and unfortunately may not always be found in those who are otherwise suited to customer service work. The quintessential “people person” may lack conscientiousness, and this one flaw can be fatal: An employee can smile, empathize, and play well with the team, but if he can’t remember to follow through on the promises he made to customers, he’ll kill your company image.

Optimism: The ability to bounce back and to not internalize challenges. Optimism is a necessity in customer-facing positions. Employees who can’t shake off a drubbing from a customer won’t last long. Support from management is, of course, important here, but the employees themselves need a positive, optimistic self-image as well to propel themselves forward in the face of daily adversity. (By the way, optimism isn’t what you hire for in every position. We all saw some years ago what an excess of optimism in the likes of Jeffrey Skilling at Enron wrought, with his mark-to-market accounting practices, and in the folks at ratings agencies who blessed worthless mortgage-backed securities as “cash equivalent.” Certainly if you’re hiring a chief safety officer, you may want some healthy pessimism. But it’s safe to say across the board that you need optimistic customer-facing employees, because, otherwise, customers will eventually wear your employees down to a nub.

supernatural selection

How to select such people? An ideal approach is to match candidates to the psychological profiles of existing, successful employees. You may not have gathered this data for yourself yet, in which case you’ll be dependent on an outside company to provide it. That’s okay, because some of the available external tools are excellent. But you need to use your chosen methodology consistently: on every hire, rather than as the whim hits you. If you use scientific methods only sporadically you’ll never know what worked and what didn’t. Instead, the selectiveness of your inherently biased—that is, human—memory will trick you and you’ll continue to favor unscientific, ineffective hiring patterns that will hamper your organization for years to come.

If you start with externally generated profiles, as you grow be sure to gather data specific to your company. This process isn’t that complicated. Have your best performers answer profile questions and then bank these results. Have your average performers do the same, and then bank those results. If you show a consistently measurable difference between these two categories of employee, you have a valid test.

trial by hire

Great companies tend to have a lengthy trial period before newly hired employees become “brand ambassadors”—that is, are ready to be foisted on the public. This is important in providing consistently great service, because how your brand is perceived is only as strong as the weakest cliché—sorry, link. There’s no truer truism than the simile of the weak link; it’s one of the unnerving truths about providing customer service. You never want those potentially weak links out there representing your brand, whether at the returns counter, the call center, or connected via their workstations to customers. The trial period is also important for protecting your company culture. Even in the besthandled hiring scenario, it can take ninety days to know if you have a fit. Most often, it takes that much time for the employee to know if there’s a fit. At the Ritz-Carlton, the first twenty-one days are treated as crucial, and if you’re not there for the big, transitional “Day 21,” you’re taken out of the work schedule. Zappos trains its prospective employees for four weeks. From week two onward, Zappos (with its unmatched dramatic flair) posts a standing offer of $2,000 cash to new hires to quit—Zappos would rather pay out that money up front than keep someone on who’s less than committed.

“fit” and its pitfalls

One of the terms that gets thrown about a lot today in discussions of hiring strategies—I’ve thrown it around a bit myself in the previous chapter—is “fit,” as in, “How well will this candidate ‘fit’ into the culture of our organization/company and exemplify our brand and our mission?” It’s not so easy to directly and definitively answer this question.

Nevertheless, there are ways companies try to ensure an outstanding fit between individuals and the company. At Whole Foods, after a candidate has completed a lengthy probationary period (thirty to ninety days), the candidate’s coworkers vote to determine whether that candidate will be hired permanently, or be sent packing.⁶ Zappos uses an array of unique activities and questions (“On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you?”) in its hiring process to ensure each candidate is going to be “one of them.”⁷ If you didn’t know how agile at hiring Whole Foods and Zappos are, you might think this sounds like a process that veers awfully close to old-fashioned hazing for membership in a fraternity or sorority. (And it’s a process that at Zappos manages to sometimes involve nearly as much alcohol: “I had three vodka shots with Tony [Hsieh, Zappos’s CEO] during my interview,” runs one jaw-dropping comment, from their now-head of human resources, Rebecca Ratner.)⁸ This is why I want to take a moment to clarify what we should mean when we talk about “fit” as it pertains to recruiting and hiring customer service professionals.

My own assessment of well-intended strategies for testing “fit” is that, in hands less capable than Zappos or Whole Foods, they can be as hit or miss as black versus red on the roulette wheel. Peer evaluations, for example, run the risk of devolving into an assessment of whether a given candidate is a good drinking buddy or a worthy World of Warcraft adversary, not to mention doing an end run around the anti-discriminatory safeguards that traditional human resources procedures have evolved to support. The psychological literature here is highly cautionary: People have an instinctive propensity to hire those who remind them of themselves, and one has to imagine that this tendency is even greater in people who aren’t trained as human resource professionals.

Properly handled, fit assessment always focuses on what is needed to be a contributing member of the organization. Anything that might stray into “hazing” territory is handled with care, forethought, and precision, as it is in the application process at Southwest Airlines. Southwest, which, by the way, receives more applicants per spot than Harvard, uses scenario-simulation exercises that, while certainly stress inducing, use problem solving, creative thinking, and collaboration skills similar to what may later be required in-flight.⁹ Southwest also has the process and results monitored and reviewed by seasoned professionals.¹⁰ There’s no room here for hiring by fiat or hunch.

Fit is a great concept, at least in theory, but so is what diversity experts like Global Novations’ Michael Hyter call inclusion: “ensuring that … there is a fair consideration for jobs for people who happen to be different.”

As Hyter explains,

The word “fit” in the absence of that support factor can easily be misinterpreted as “being like me,” instead of what the position requires. Many organizations make the mistake of assuming that those tasked with selecting new hires are equipped to do so fairly because they are nice people or good workers. But failure to ensure the selection process is based on standard criteria with trained interviewers can result in unintentional bias in the spirit of looking for someone who’s a perceived “good fit.”¹¹

The incomparable wit Dorothy Parker was once asked the first thing she noticed in a person. Her answer? “Whether they’re a man or a woman.” Parker had a more direct connection to her subconscious than most of us, and in her quip lies the problem with “fit” in its raw state. You can substitute whatever obvious—and perhaps legally actionable—superficiality you like into Parker’s line, and you’ll find the unfortunate truth: Superficial differences and similarities are often the first things we notice. It’s important to get beyond them.

“and your point is?”

First, hire the right people, psychologically speaking, and then train them on your technology.

Hire people who, by the time they reach the age of employment, have come through childhood unscathed, retaining standards for pro-customer, pro-team traits, the innate stuff that more or less can’t be taught.

Hire your team based on the WETCO psychological traits:

Warmth: Simple human kindness

Empathy: The ability to sense what another person is feeling

Teamwork: The bias against “I can do it all myself” and toward “Let’s work together to make this happen.”

Conscientiousness: Detail orientation, including an ability and willingness to follow through to completion

Optimism: The ability to bounce back and not internalize challenges

A key to getting better and better at selecting successful applicants is, as your company grows, to develop and make use of psychological profiles that match candidates with successful employees already on your team. A test is validated if it shows a pattern of difference when taken by your existing top performers and then by your average performers.

Great companies often have a significant trial (probationary) period before newly hired employees become “brand ambassadors.”

A trial period protects the company culture: Even in the besthandled hiring scenario, it can take ninety days for either the candidate or you to know if you have a fit.

Be careful with peer evaluations of potential employees. Although this technique may have value, it runs the risk of devolving into an assessment of whether a given candidate is a good drinking buddy, not to mention being a potential end run around the anti-discriminatory safeguards that traditional human resources procedures have evolved to support.

Properly handled, fit assessment focuses on what is needed to be a contributing member of the organization and is fair to those who are different. Many organizations mistakenly assume that those tasked with selecting new hires are equipped to do so fairly because they’re hard workers or nice folks. But if the selection process is nonscientific and not run with the assistance of trained interviewers, it may result in unintentional exclusion of people for non-job-related differences.