In all walks of life, empathy between people creates successful outcomes, never more so than in great Customer Experience. But leadership plays a crucial role too.
This week Yomdel CEO, Andy Soloman spoke to The Leaders Council of Great Britain & Northern Ireland, on the subject of leadership. And following Andy in the interview, none other than the great Sir Geoff Hurst, of England 1966 and World Cup Final hat-trick fame!
The podcast of their interview is right here and below for you to listen to, and both of their comments strike powerful chords with us when we think about the challenges faced by business leaders in delivering the very best for their customers.
1. Empathy - is at the heart of great service. If the people providing service on behalf of your business (staff, suppliers, outsource partners) don't empathise with the customer, then the service they give will be compromised. And worse still, often the customer will pick up on this, and it will reflect very poorly on your brand. Andy picks up on this in the interview here, and reflects upon its impact at all levels.
Because empathy doesn't only impact your business between staff and customers. Leaders need to have empathy too. Understanding the challenges faced by your teams on a daily basis, is the only way to ensure you provide them with the tools, capacity and assistance required to deliver the great service you aspire too.
So empathy must run right the way through every part of a business, to deliver the compound effect it will have for a team to achieve their business goals together.
2. Leadership - is crucial to ensure that business teams, processes and customer experiences are optimised. As Sir Geoff reminds us, leaders must make difficult decisions, sometimes dropping a player from the first team if they are not performing. This of course is for the good of the overall team and the desired result.
Then combined with empathy, leadership is about coaching those same team members to better performance. A team needs focus and direction from its leaders, with clear guidance on what success looks like. (How do I get on the first team?)
The role of a business leader is a challenging one, balancing standard setting and performance management with coaching, support, empowerment and empathy.
3. Customer Experience - at the very highest levels is a very attainable goal nowadays. In speaking about Yomdel, Andy explains the reasons behind our fully managed Live Chat service, essentially to provide a highly trained, expert and professional capability to client businesses in specific areas of their customer service that they would struggle to do themselves.
The same as picking the right players for the team, in order to get the very best result possible. Recruiting a specialist, expert in what they do, to work alongside a team who are also expert in a separate element of the process is good team leadership.
Sir Geoff echoes this several times in his focus on the absolute professionalism required in team members to ultimately succeed. Teaching teams to be the very best they can, against a set of objective best practice criteria is also something Yomdel does, as a natural conclusion of our Mystery Shopping services. Giving a team a set of objective performance targets to meet, and measuring them against these, is a fundamental part of motivating and incentivising winning teams.
Hope you enjoy listening, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on the subjects discussed here. Leave a blog comment below, or schedule a chat if you'd like to talk in person.