Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Hi, this is Ron Kaufman. I’m with Jeff Eilersen, and we’re looking at what are the major reasons that clients come and knock on our door and say I wonder if you could help us. We’ve got five reasons to cover. The first for Jeff, last one number five.

Jeff: This one’s a bit overarching, but it’s really the disconnect between how leaders see service and service performance and how those who are actually performing the service see service performance. And it works both ways. Sometimes we have organizations who say, “You know what our leaders think service is great around here” but the people on the front lines are operational saying, “You know what, we’re struggling. There’s a lot of problems that leadership is not seeing”. 

But it’s the reverse as well, where you have people on the front lines, people operationally say “Hey what we’re doing is good enough” “Well it’s good enough” “Why should we do any better”? And the leaders are saying “Yeah this good enough isn’t going to be good enough for long”.  They’re looking around the corner at competitive situations, rising expectations. They know they cannot keep their edge with the level of service that’s being provided.

Ron:  What do you do, how do we bring this together?

Jeff: Well, that’s the issue. It’s creating a way that there can be some more fluidity between understanding awareness, continuous improvement that cuts across these levels. And what happens is, customer service often gets put in a box and it’s put down in a department. But they’re not seeing it more holistically as a leadership issue, as a cultural issue and something that everybody’s involved in.

Ron:  So one of the things that our service excellence principles and workshops and certification of workshop leaders do is it produces what we call a common service language. All of our principles are not, auto industry principles and banking industry principles. They are generic service principles. All of our principles are not external service principles or internal service principles. They actually apply to any service situation. So then I would imagine they can even apply if I’m a leader thinking about how I am serving my team. Is that helping to get one language working through the whole organisation? 

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. It just reminds me. I was with a client recently who said they had six different customer service training programs language going on. All at cross-purposes. And there’s no way that you can achieve a culture of service or a relationship between leaders and employees, that’s fluid and natural if you have all that or between departments.

Ron: Right. And that naturally happens because the finance department has one language, marketing departments got another language, and HR departments got another language. They don’t have a common service language. 

Jeff: So the common service language lets us all talk together, the same language of what’s happening, what level of service we provide. And what’s fascinating to me about that is how senior leaders tend to be the ones who grab hold of that first. They recognize, once they see it they recognize the value of power and they can be a good role model and the responsibility. 

Ron: We’ve seen clients where the team will do that, and I talked to the CEO a year later, and they don’t know the language of the principle. I know they’re going to have problems. And then you got others where within a month, the CEO has embraced the language of our fundamental service principles, is using them and insisting that everybody else does, and you know you’re going to have a successful case study.  

Jeff: I had one CEO -manufacturing company. He said, “I don’t care about any other measure for the first six months. All they want to pay attention to is am I hearing this language in the organization“. Because you know that if you’re using the language that produces and supports a certain kind of meaning and that’s something that we’re now all going to share as we focus on whatever it is we want to improve. Thank you, Jeff.

Jeff: Welcome

Ron: It’s a pleasure to do these interviews with you and to work with you, with clients all over the world.

Jeff: Good Ron, feelings mutual.