Tuesday, June 15, 2021
The 6.5 FCS-21 vaccination your business critically needs
Getting your business FCS-21 vaccinated entails executing the next six and a
half steps as rigorously as we espouse in this guide. Tried by thousands of
businesses across this world, the FCS-21 vaccine has inoculated these
businesses against the typical anemic customer experience that befuddles
corporate America, furnishing the employee with the facilities they needed to
deliver top-class customer service seamlessly.
The 6.5 FCS-21 vaccination steps include:
1. Side-by-Side Walking
2. Smart Tasking
3. Make-it-Right Power
4. What-if Arsenal
5. Bubble-Up Innovation
6. Relentless Focus
6. 5. Just Make It Happen
How about we dive into each of these vaccination procedures?
1. Side-by-Side Walking
The saying, "only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches", is incredibly true.
It is difficult to accurately evaluate the role of your employees unless you
embark on an in-person investigative exploration of the job.
It is easy to draw the charts and graphs from your aristocratic perch far away
from the frontline) in your executive office. But only the frontline employee
knows the exhaustive specifics of each dot on that chart: the customer
temperament, customer's purchasing power, arrangement…
Immersing yourself experimentally in a specific role occupied by your employee
will give you a valuable packet of firsthand information on the everyday
experience of that frontline employee.
To achieve the side-by-side walking step, you must first have a firm
understanding of the role. Specifically document the details of that position,
spanning the objectives and KPIs, the tasks, and anticipated challenges the
employee (filling that role) should encounter.
Now get into the employees' shoes either by exclusively filling their position
momentarily) or supporting that employee in person for a specific period.
Stepping into the frontline employee's shoes may go as far as wearing their
robes: physical accouterments like their uniforms, aprons, hats…All these aim
to give you a 3D (holistic) appreciation of the role.
At the end of your investigation, compile your findings and measure them
against that role's originally documented operational blueprint. What
adaptations can you squeeze in the face of the lessons mined from that role
tour? What extra equipment do such employees need in their armory to better
handle the frontiers?
2. Smart Tasking
Flexibility is a core part of the FCS-21 vaccination. But an overdose of flexibility
in operation introduces disorder and elaborate unpredictability into the
process. While the FCS-21 vaccination espouses employees being granted
substantial space for innovation, priorities and anticipated outcomes (say
objectives) must be clearly established from the start.
With this approach, the destination (and time of arrival in the form of deadlines)
is definitively stated but the pathway taken to that destination is at the
innovative determination of the employee.
This way, the employee is no longer chained to the orthodox textbook. He is
free to juice the process with his innovative enterprise so long the anticipated
outcome is achieved within the stipulated time frame.
3. Make-it-Right Power
There are few ways as effective at economically strangulating your business in a
post-COVD corporate setting as binging on bureaucracy. Oh, you think it was
only the Orangutans that were critically endangered? Customer tolerance is too.
Customers are now incredibly impatient and will jolt out of the door at the
slightest irritation or delay. Yes, they are walking away with your dollars if you
don't speed your process up.
How better can you achieve this than by empowering your employees with the
make-it-right power? Indeed, a reasonable dose of autonomy should be
deposited with each frontline employee to enable them to solve solutions in
real-time.
They don't need to call you in your office for approval before they smile at the
buyer. Equip them with substantial operational autonomy to provide
instantaneous and responsive solutions to the customer without having to
bureaucratically relay the information up the channels and waiting decades for
executive approval.
The policy here is simple. Leave the small fires for your frontline employees to
quench and focus on the strategic infernos.
Yes, your employees can abuse the make-it-right power. This is why even you
need to modulate the powers allocated to them with a best-practice document
that espouses a clear pack of guidelines on first-resort handling of customer
emergencies.
If this first-aid kit therapy doesn't suffice, the employee can then innovate
within the boundaries of authority allocated to him to solve that problem. This
means as you distribute power, the hierarchical boundaries must be illuminated
so that each employee is absolutely clear on what solutions fall within the ambit
of his jurisdiction and which he should pass up to his superiors.
4. What-if Arsenal
You definitely can't predict all the eventualities that could happen as your
employees execute their roles. The spectrum of possibilities in the frontline is
overwhelming even as far as the customer being in high spirits (after winning a
lottery just yesterday) or really low spirits (after having his Tinder date fail to
show up).
However, you can do a substantial piece to mitigate the disruptive tendencies of
such operational spontaneity. This is by organizing a document that compiles
the most frequent incidences on the frontline into a standardized manual
stating the various solution mechanisms your employee can adopt if each of
these situations occurs. Yes, this is the what-if arsenal.
For example, if the customer says his budget will not suffice for A, recommend
B. If a customer says he is in a hurry to meet an appointment, do X. If a buyer
presents a fake dollar bill, activate Y…
Of course, the what-if arsenal can't be a stale or some "sacred scroll" passed
down uncompromisingly from generation to generation. No, this what-if
arsenal must be "breathing". Yes, it must be alive, dynamic, and energetically
responsive to changing scenarios in the frontline.
This means the what-if arsenal must be updated from time to time to reflect
and integrate a healthy dose of evolution in frontline experiences. Publish this
what-if arsenal and ensure to broadcast the latest edition to all your frontline
employees, keeping them up-to-date while extensively educating new hires on
the current edition of the what-if arsenal.
5. Bubble-Up Innovation
One of the most ridiculous administrative suicides you can embark on after the
pandemic is to drown in your ego enough to mistake your frontline employees
for brainless pawns moving lifelessly around at your creative leisure.
Your frontline employees are more than just boots on the ground; they are also
brains on the ground. They are not emotionless or cerebrally handicapped; they
don't just live for the orders you scream at them. They have their ideas too!
Yes, your frontline employees are best exposed to the creative juices pouring
from their direct interaction with the buyer. They have a more emphatic
appreciation of the real-life conditions at the frontline, giving them more data
than you have in your air-conditioned manager's office to make deductions or
predictions.
Once in a while, bring them to the table and hear their ideas out. The FCS-21
vaccine strongly urges establishing the administrative conduciveness for
bubble-up innovation from the frontline.
Ask them what they – from their experience of the frontier – would do if they
were in your managerial shoes to speed up service delivery, improve upsells,
accrue more positive customer reviews…
Nourish –not exterminate – ideas from the guys at the front. Yes, you have your
idea, but let them garnish it with some creative condiments fresh from the
frontline.
I always tell the managers I consult not to abort the ideas from their employees
have right at the fetal stage. As the business owner, you need excellent
administrative- midwifery in helping your employees birth these ideas and see
which can be adopted into your operational handbook.
6. Relentless Focus
The FCS-21 vaccination will lose a massive chunk of its efficacy if there is
intermittency in the focus on delivering world-class customer service. There
needs to an exhaustive and relentless consumption with providing world-class
customer service.
Premium customer service shouldn't be ceremonious, in terms of it happening
in select or unique intervals or days. No, it has to be a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week,
52-weeks a year preoccupation. The focus isn't going on vacation once in a
while…it is a stable staple.
For all classes of recruits, for all levels of leadership, the fervent idolization of
world-class customer service must be ingrained into the company's
consciousness. Everyone must be trained to perpetually ingest and binge on
excellent customer service delivery that it becomes muscle memory.
6.5. Now Just Make It Happen
Alright, we have said a ton, but now is the time for action. Yes, it is now time
for you to put things in motion. You will agree this is the most critical phase of
all the vaccination procedures we have espoused all from the beginning. It is
that glue that gets the whole package sticking together and working
concertedly as a functional mechanism.
This enormous criticality of this last stage doesn't however discount the
essentiality of each of the aforementioned stages. You will not effectively make
it happen if you missed or wrongly executed the Side-by-Side Walking, Smart
Tasking, Make-it-Right Power, What-if Arsenal, Bubble-Up Innovation, or the
Relentless Focus.
To get it right, you must get it ALL right! Now complete your FCS-21
vaccination and watch your business exponentially thrives in a post-COVID
America.
Michael D. Brown
The leading authority on delivering Fresh Results®
Michael D. Brown is a sought-after speaker, global management expert, and author of Fresh Passion: Get A Brand or Die A Generic (MyFreshBrand.com), Fresh Customer Service®: Treat the Employee as #1 and the Customer as #2 and You Will Get Customers for Life (FreshCustomerService.com), Fresh Notes on Personal Branding, Fresh Notes on Customer Service, Fresh Notes on How Not to Graduate into Poverty, and Fresh Passion Leadership – Become a Distinct Branded Leader or Extinct Generic. He has over eighteen years of experience helping companies and individuals achieve results and has held numerous leadership positions at Fortune Global 100 Companies.
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