The majority of companies today stress the importance of treating customers well and satisfying all their demands and some of them go to the extent of calling on all their employees to treat customers as kings under the slogan “The Customer is King”, ignoring the necessity of employees treating colleagues with the same respect and consideration they show to customers or even training them on how to do that.
Failing to enforce this training, so employees’ treatment of colleagues is what it should be will end up with an unhappy customer, who didn’t get what was promised, and an unhappy colleague who was set up for failure.
While doing the opposite will bring benefits and these are:
Actually, it’s easy to work in a short-sighted silo, so that the only thing that matters at the moment and at every moment is pleasing the customer. However, pleasing your colleagues will provide greater engagement likewise:
Failing to also please your colleagues, on whom you are depending to do the necessary work, will produce exactly the opposite result and that is an unpleasant customer.
Training employees to treat colleagues with the same respect and consideration they show to customers will end up with you experiencing a co-worker who is wonderful to customers or clients, and so wonderful to colleagues inside the company.
If you enforce this training, so employees’ treatment of colleagues is what it should be you will harvest the benefits of treating colleagues as customers
You could train all employees to treat their internal colleagues with the same tact and consideration they use when dealing with customers, for in addition to making it easier for employees to work with one another, treating employees like customers has benefits in enhancing the employee experience and employee engagement.
Employees trained to act with respect and consideration towards each other will provide benefits one of which is greater productivity for:
People tend to care more about their work when they feel cared for.
In one-on-one employee relationships, an employee is going to want to do more
for the colleague who treats him/her with the same charm and courtesy that they treat a customer
Versus an employee who is so hyper-critical and hypocritical, then other employees will feel like put-upon short-order cook.
When you feel like a colleague rather than an overtaxed servant, not surprisingly, communication also improves which leads to higher cooperation and productivity.
If your colleague is thinking of you with the same respect and consideration they would use to think of a customer, they also will listen to you more closely and the result is greater delivery likewise:
You find you can freely express when an assignment doesn’t seem like it’s going to be deliverable, or that it won’t be deliverable within the timeframe your colleague has requested. We bet this situation has happened at some point in your organization, so what is the solution to this problem?
“Let’s find a timeline that works for both of us,” the colleague would likely say to a customer. “Obviously, we want to create a plan that’s going to be successful on both our ends.” What if your colleague said a variation of that same statement to you? Just as they would check with a customer before setting a plan in place, they would check with their colleague before finalizing plans.
“How does that plan sound to you?” they would ask you. “Does that sound like a realistic timeline that will allow you to do everything you need to do by that time?”
That conversation would take place before making promises to the customer.
You would never start work with colleagues before having a conversation with the customer about expectations and needs, so why wouldn’t you do the same for your own colleagues?
What is the best way to train all employees that treating colleagues with the same consideration as customers is part of your corporate culture? It may be assumed that the company’s leaders are the only ones responsible for treating employees with respect and care. If it’s not pointed out to employees during training, they may not realize that it’s also their responsibility to enforce the culture of treating employees as customers.
Treating colleagues like customers will provide greater performance for:
When employees are coordinated in their understanding and feeling of security about the promises that have been made to customers, the end-product delivered to the customer will probably be improved, for unsatisfied customers are usually the result of over-promising and under-delivering.
Employees who are more popular with customers than colleagues sometimes make the mistake of selling products and services that don’t exist, or will be impossible to deliver, because they don’t understand their colleagues’ work processes.
So, these employees promise something that is possible in theory, but not in practice given the workflow of their colleagues, accordingly they may not realize that what they promised will take twice as long as they originally thought because no one taught them that.
The training solution is to make sure every employee in a work group understands not only what all their colleagues do, but how they do it.
Training is not luxury; it is believing in making things better through investing in people’s intellectual capital and people without training are like plants without water. To that end, the aim of Level Up is to provide people with specialized and hands-on business training & consulting and assist them using their own capabilities and developing their personal skills in the workplace, until Level Up presence is no longer required.
Level Up provides consultative business training solutions in the fields of management, sales, marketing, retail, negotiation skills, purchasing and human resources.
Source: https://trainingmag.com/treating-colleagues-like-customers/