Restoring the Workfore to the Customer Equation.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Brief Article

A school of thought--temporarily discredited during the information technology explosion--has re-emerged. This school holds that the workforce is the primary factor in influencing customer behavior. This trend is bound to be welcomed by both customers and sales and service people.

It is easy to see why companies are once again concerned about the workforce. "Service Stinks!" moaned a recent cover of Business Week in an issue devoted to the vast gulf between consumer expectations and what they actually get.

The plunge has been ironic. Over the last few years, it has paralleled an explosion in customer information and technology intended to create just the opposite effect. But the pendulum swung too far.

As companies sought to instill a sales and service culture, programs for doing so emanated from headquarters. Top management attempted to impose these cultures on delivery systems operating largely without the disciplines or processes common to other parts of the organization. The "command and control" approach of headquarters dispirited the front-line workforce.

Simultaneously, companies bent on improving service adopted exciting new technologies to enforce the new processes and disciplines--to make them operate more predictably and efficiently (if not more wisely). Accidentally, but inexorably, management found the technology more appealing than the workforce--easier to buy and install, always motivated, willing to work three shifts without breaks and faster to scale.

An aggrieved workforce

According to our own research with BAI (Survival at the Front Line: Best Practices in Building a Sales Culture), 49 percent of front-line managers surveyed feel their sales goals are unfair, 50 percent feel management is not actively involved in developing a customer-focused organization, and 78 percent feel or may feel pressured to sell beyond customer need. This is a picture of an aggrieved workforce serving an expectant but perennially disappointed customer base.

Now the pendulum is swinging back. Companies are struggling to match their gains in customer information technology with a workforce better enabled to maximize it. As evidence, consider E*Trade, an icon...