Chapter 17

 Finding and Hiring Service Winners

“It’s so hard to get good help these days!”

While some people repeat that old saying as a joke, for many companies it’s no laughing matter. Especially when employees account for well over 50 percent of the total resource budget. Despite mergers, corporate downsizing, and the flattening of many organizations, there’s a real crunch on for qualified human resources at pay rates within your budget.

And as our clients tell us—even those with shrinking staffs—their number one challenge is not competitors, or the economy, or change. They say it’s finding and keeping good people. And by that, we’re sure they mean the best people.

Good people keep you in the race. The best people win it.

The product you sell will never be unique. But the people who deliver it always will be. You can reach a ceiling for a product’s technical performance, but there’s no limit to how much people appreciate being treated with respect, kindness, and, yes, gratitude for their business. The competitive advantage in business today comes down to this fundamental: Relationships between people. You bet your business on the people you hire to deal with your customers.

A Tough Job to Love

Let’s be brutally honest. Customer service jobs, for better or worse, tend not to be at the top of the economic ladder. And they’re usually not most people’s dream job. (Don’t misunderstand; we think customer service posts can be very rewarding, fulfilling, and lots of fun for people suited to them. But few people in high school or college would list customer service as their ultimate career aspiration. The same can be said for sales and many other jobs.)

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 Tales from the Real World
Marriott, a service leader in the intensely competitive, service-intense hotel business, has gained considerable notability for its experience in hiring many hundreds of service workers from . . . the welfare rolls. And it had been doing so for many years before it became politically popular to call for programs to move people from welfare rolls to payrolls.

 

Without shame, the company acknowledges that it employs “the working poor.” It’s the nature of the business it’s in, the company says. But it does so with a caring commitment to its employees and respect for their dignity. Marriott provides extensive training and lifestyle benefits like childcare and education and counseling services to its hardworking service employees. It even maintains what it calls an “employee concierge” to help struggling working people cope with the demands of life that can interfere with regularly coming to work on time.

 

Not only has Marriott tapped a new source of reliable labor (with turnover rates lower than that for other employees), it’s available at the rates the inn-keeper wants to pay, and its efforts have earned the firm prominent coverage in prestigious media such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

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Special Generalists

Companies expect many skills from the people they hire to deal with their customers. Hey, you have to. Giving customers personal, pleasing interactions takes many skills and a special inclination for caring. Not everyone is suited to it.

A person good at customer service is part:

• Ambassador
• Negotiator
• Advocate
• Accountant
• Administrator
• Confidant
• Detective
• Guardian of the corporate coffers
• Nursemaid
• Troubleshooter
• Peacemaker
• Teacher
• Technocrat
• Salesperson
• Gracious host

To get people on your payroll capable of delivering the Service Difference for your company, you need to do these three things:

1. Attract qualified (or moldable) people.
2. Identify them before you select them to join your organization.
3. Shape, modify, and alter them to embody your cultural values and accomplish the work tasks you set before them.

A Successful Commitment Example

Publix Super Markets, a large ($10 billion in annual sales) and fast-growing grocery chain in the southeastern U.S., has won wide recognition, customer loyalty, and financial success from its commitment to customer service. President Ed Crenshaw tells us that the chain’s award-winning service comes from a commitment to service that begins on the first day of employment for a new employee (or associate in Publix parlance). He points out that many times a new employee may be only 16 or 17 years old. (How would you like to bet your reputation on a 16-year-old kid holding your valued customer’s Instant of Absolute Judgment in his or her hands!)

“We really can’t tell in advance if an employee is going to have the commitment to service that we require,” Crenshaw admits. But he says that his very young employees tend to be impressionable and eager to please. So they can be shaped into the Publix mold of award- (and loyalty-) winning service. And, according to our analysis, the grocer does seven critically important things to increase their odds of perpetuating a culture “Where shopping is a pleasure.”

Here is what Publix does to get employees off on the right foot:

1. They ask their employees to recommend new hires. Nice, friendly, service-minded people tend to associate with others cut from the same cloth. Friends and relatives of good employees often make good employees.
2. They indoctrinate new hires into the culture of service on their very first day on the job. They watch videos about the company’s service commitment. They hear from store management and their new coworkers about the importance of service, service, service.
3. New Publix associates are paired with a “buddy”—an experienced, service-minded associate—who essentially shares a job with the new associate until, in the buddy’s opinion, the newbie is ready to fly solo. “That raises our operating costs,” says Crenshaw. “But we feel the investment in assuring good service is worth it.” (And, no doubt, the practice motivates the tenured “buddy” whose skill and judgment are affirmed as valuable.)
4. Publix hires new associates on a probationary basis. If store management guessed wrong about the new hire’s ability to deliver high quality service, they urge the person to pursue an alternate career (or at least one that takes him or her somewhere else).
5. Publix pays wages slightly above market. “We expect a bit more from our associates so we pay a bit more,” president Crenshaw says.
6. Publix promotes from within. It grows its own. A 16-year-old bagger may not fantasize about the exciting, fast-paced world of green bananas, canned goods, and frozen carrots, but he or she sees a possible career path to good paying management in a business that’s about as stable as they come, with good benefits, and, of course, a friendly, pleasant atmosphere.
7. Publix is employee owned. Doing a good job and treating customers right not only helps with job security, it can build long-term wealth through the company stock plan. At Publix, every employee has a stake in how well customers are served.

After starting new hires off on the right foot, Publix tends to keep its good people for the long-run. And that translates into lower turnover that lowers costs, raises service levels, and pleases more customers. And all that leaves competitors—who sell identical products often a bit cheaper—eating Publix left-overs.

Personality Is Competence

Most people who hire other people tend to look at education, technical skill, and work experience. Those might be important sometimes, but more often than not, it’s the values and personality of the individual in a service job that will determine success or failure.

Before going further, let’s briefly explain what we mean by personality. As we define it, a personality is made of:

• Beliefs. What we believe, at our core, drives our actions. At the most fundamental level, whether we believe that life and humanity is Good (or not) colors our basic approach to life—and work.
• Values. We all value different things. Some people value working on mechanical things, others would rather pursue scholarly interests, while others would rather spend their time chit-chatting with other people. Some people value free time. Others value the recognition that comes from their work achievements more than they do free time. What a person values drives their behavior. So your values play a major role in shaping your overall personality. Your values impact the decisions you make regarding the level of education you want to attain, the skills you want to learn, and the experience you wish to accumulate.
• Behavioral preferences. Some people want to socialize with other people. Some would almost rather die than have to socialize on a constant basis. Some people like to analyze things and compartmentalize most everything into highly structured schemes. Some people much prefer to “wing it.” Still others want to command a situation, not analyze or talk about it. And yet others want a prescribed structure and set of rules to guide their behavior.

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 Quote, Unquote
You can have standards, but you can’t enforce kindness.
—Holly Stiel

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Caring Is Ingrained

You can instruct people to say “Good morning,” and “How may I help you,” and “Thank you for choosing [Your Company].” But you can’t train people to care. That they need to bring to the job.

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 Watch It!
Hiring a person who isn’t a good fit with his job costs you in many ways. It costs you in lost managerial and administrative time for interviews, processing, orientation, and training. It costs you in lost productivity. And most importantly, it can cost you in lost customers, and bad word of mouth—which can cost you even more. Hire your service people very carefully. You’re literally betting your business on them.

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If you’re going to consistently provide great service, the kind that withstands the Instant of Absolute Judgement, your people need to have caring imprinted on their DNA. You just can’t fake caring—at least not for very long. People who only pretend to care will reveal themselves sooner or later. The more stressful the environment, the faster the real selfish self comes bubbling up. And stressful times are when you need to be the nicest.

It Takes All Kinds

While we do believe there’s a caring personality, we’re also sure you can’t see it with the unaided eye. Just as it’s false to think that talkative people make better sales representatives than quieter, more reflective people, it’s a mistake to think that people who appear friendly in a job interview are natural “service types.”

In an employment interview, many people can be whomever they think you want for the job. Even if you’ve hired many, many people, you can be fooled. There will be more on conducting the job interview later in this chapter. For now, let’s just make this point:

A true service personality is not something you can directly observe or quickly detect.

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 At Your Service
People who truly care about pleasing your customers don’t all look alike, sound alike, or talk alike. Caring comes from deep inside, and can be found within people of all externally obvious personalities. When hiring customer service people, go beyond the superficial to uncover the real person interviewing for the job. That’s the person who, day-in and day-out, will be dealing with your customers.

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What Personality Do You Need to Hire?

All customer service jobs are not the same. Someone processing returns at a discount store may share some characteristics with a CSR in a special service unit of a firm that constructs nuclear power plants. But people in both jobs will likely have distinct characteristics that make them ideally suited for one or the other position.

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 At Your Service
The better you identify the kind of person you really need to be successful in a given job, the better your chances of finding her, and of her being successful in the job. Only when you know what you’re looking for will you be able to figure out the questions you need to ask to assess whether you’ve found what you’re looking for.

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How do you know what kind of personality will be suited to a particular job? Well, first you need to understand what the job truly requires. How do you do that? You analyze the job. Determine the fundamental skills it takes to perform it well. Some possibilities include:

• Analytic
• Creative
• Computational
• Interpersonal
• Adherence to strict rules or protocol
• Handling multiple tasks at the same time
• Project management
• Conflict resolution
• Supervisory/managerial
• Negotiating
• Time management

If you assign yourself the task, you can probably identify many of the true skills—not job duties—that lie within a particular job function. There are also instruments that help you create a job skill profile. They are usually available from human resource or management consultants (such as your authors).

Before you set off to fill a job, even one you’re sure you understand quite well, it’s a good idea to view it with a fresh pair of eyes looking at it through the fundamental skills lens. You may have overlooked or underestimated an important skill set that you haven’t previously sought in job candidates for the position.

When you match a job’s skill characteristics to a person whose beliefs, values, and behavioral preferences align well, you vastly increase the chances for a successful hire.

How Do You Assess Personality?

Trying to understand what makes someone tick might sound like it either requires a degree in psychology, or, perhaps, a crystal ball. But it really is simpler and less intimidating and more chancy than that.

Reading Personalities

If you spend enough time with an applicant, and ask the right questions, you increase your odds of discovering the true person behind the job application. You can further increase your chances for fully understanding an applicant through the use of personality profiling instruments. There are many brands and varieties of these. All pretty much do the same thing: identify a person’s preferences for how they would like to act during their waking hours.

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 At Your Service
One of the advantages of personality profiling instruments is that they often rule in people who might have been ruled out because they didn’t impress an interviewer at first glance. The written instruments can reveal parts of the candidate not visible to even the most open trained eye.

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You might want to use these instruments to profile the behavioral characteristics of your most successful people already in the job that you’re looking to fill. This can sometimes be surprisingly revealing, and run against your intuition. But it can give you a good benchmark for finding people who will likely behave like Sally and Juan, your star performers, even if the applicants don’t seem to be like them at all at first glance.

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 Quote, Unquote
Hire friendly; train technical.
—Bill Marriott, CEO, Marriott Hotels

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Ask, Task, and Ye Shall Unveil

When you interview a prospective employee, ask questions that reveal the real person behind the interview mask. Assess the candidate for those characteristic skills you need in the job (which you identified when you profiled the job as recommended above).

For example, if you determined that the job requires a great deal of repetitive work with little variation, you might ask the job candidate about that directly.

Then, later in the interview, try to assess for it indirectly. Ask: Given a choice between a day filled with many different things to do, or doing one basic job many times over, which would you prefer? Ask: Do you get bored easily? Customer service training firm Kaset International recommends asking this question: If you have 25 people in a row who have similar questions about a bill, how will you maintain interest in each customer?

Then test the applicant for his or her tolerance for repetitive work. Ask the candidate to fold 200 napkins. If he or she balks or seems irritated at about number 75, you may have a truer answer than any slick interview reply.

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 At Your Service
When people interview, they wear a mask. It’s the face, appearance, and demeanor they feel they need to get the job. Your task is to see through this mask and identify the true person. The secret of how to do this is to ask penetrating questions.

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Or, if your job requires handling many tasks simultaneously, start the candidate on a test task and interrupt him—several times. Ask him to do several different tasks in addition to the initial one you assigned. Ask him to repeat back to you a list of three things you ask him to remember. How does he handle it?

Can the candidate for a customer contact job come up with five different ways of greeting you? Do you detect an inclination to smile, and is it a genuine, “I like being in your presence” smile?

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 At Your Service
Behavioral scientists suggest that past behavior is an excellent predictor of future behavior. Based on our work with clients, we tend to agree with this. To get a good picture of the candidate, ask him to go back in time and describe instances of when he needed to perform the skills you are looking for—whether that was in a paying job, volunteer role, or other situation. Ask him about any difficulties he may have had. Have him tell you of two instances where applying those skills made for a success. Then ask about two instances that weren’t so successful. Many times you learn more from these answers than you do from the answers describing success. Hey, we’re all human and we all make mistakes. Did your job candidate learn from his?

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How does the candidate deal with people not interviewing him for a job? Arrange to leave the room and have some apparent underling pop into your interview space and ask the candidate for information he couldn’t possibly have. (“Excuse me, can you tell me how to reach the Information Technology help desk?”) Better yet, have a couple of people make apparently unscheduled appearances. Does he greet them? How does he respond to them? Have another “job candidate” show up for an interview? Does he explain that his interviewer stepped out but should return shortly? Is he friendly or combative to his “competition”?

I’m a People Person

Sounds like a great bent for a customer service job doesn’t it? Sure. But here’s something to explore with your people person applicant. Just how much peopleing are they ready and willing to take? Some people like people but only in small doses. Others have an almost physiological need for constant people contact. Both types genuinely like people, in approximately the same way, but not with the same intensity or tolerance. Before you hire somebody to sit in a cubicle, or stand in a store to talk to strangers non-stop for eight hours a day—every day—make sure they’re up for it.

Probe in the interview for examples of how much time they tend to spend with people. Real, hardcore, people-people seek people constantly, whether their job calls for it or not.

Seek Giving Servers

“There are only two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers,” Don is fond of saying. Well, arguably, that might be a matter of degree, but this much is certain, your service people need to give (and give and give and give). If that giving doesn’t come naturally, it’s not going to come. Period. When you need givers to serve your customers, hire givers.

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 Tales from the Real World
A down-on-his-luck taxpayer hitchhiked from out of state to the IRS Ogden, Utah Service Center to pick up his refund check. As it turns out, Ogden doesn’t issue checks. But IRS employees there confirmed that he was due a refund. They ordered a check sent to Ogden from a disbursing center. Because the process would take 10 days, and the hitchhiker had no money, IRS employees found him shelter and collected enough food money to see him through until the check arrived.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, that same IRS center earned a prestigious Presidential Award for Quality.

 

Givers give, wherever they’re employed. And it shows.

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How do you know who’s a giver? You can’t test with certainty, but you can look for telltale signs:

• Have they done volunteer work? (Occasional blood donor counts, so does Brownie troop leader, or PTA, or Get Out the Vote, or Walk-a-thons, and so on.)
• Did they work professionally at a charity or do-gooder organization? Takers tend to avoid these.
• Did they work in a small company where they needed to wear many hats?
• Were they once members of, or did they want a career in, a “helping profession” like teaching, nursing, day care, or social work?
• Did they wait on tables? What percentage did they average in tips? What did they think of the way customers treated them? Yours won’t be perceived as any better—believe us—no matter how much “better” a clientele you have.
• Did they serve in the military? The armed services teach people to treat other people with respect (yes, sir; yes, ma’am) or at least deliver a convincing approximation of it.
• Did they ever deal with the public before? What kind of experience was that? What was the worst and best day on the job? What would they have changed? Listen closely here.

You might ask about the sacrifices your job candidate has made in life. People who have never sacrificed probably don’t know much about giving. And those who’ve sacrificed but recall it with bitterness don’t know much about giving either.

True givers are people who serve with joy. They find fulfillment, meaning in it. Hire people like that, and you will please your customers.

And Now, This Diversion

Diversify. That’s good investment advice for a stock portfolio. And it’s a good hiring policy, too. If you’ve been to any industry conference, picked up a magazine, or read a business book lately, you’ve probably heard lots about diversity.

In short, it makes good sense to hire a wide variety of people. People of different color. People with different professional backgrounds. People with different accents. (If they speak clearly, communicate well over the phone, and can otherwise do the job, don’t hesitate to hire them.) Listen closely to TV anchormen Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. They speak with accents. Rather is from Texas; Jennings from Canada.

With more diversity on your payroll:

• You gain a wider perspective in your workforce
• Your service group will more accurately reflect the population at large—your customers
• You’ll enjoy a richer, more satisfying work environment

Variety is the spice of life . . . in all things.