Exceptional Customer Service Flows from Sound Organization Design
By Michelle Malay Carter on October 15, 2007
As you make your way through the world as a consumer, how often are you pleasantly surprised by the service you receive?? For me, I suspect it’s about 5% of the time.? What values do many face-to-customer systems telegraph? In spite of what a company’s corporate values proclaim, customers are an afterthought, if a thought at all.
From Posters to Practice – Are Corporate Values Useful?
My experience bears that something gets lost in the translation from the glossy, optimistic?corporate-values statement posted on the breakroom wall and the day-in day-out ways in which?employees interact with customers.
In a corporate values study conducted by Booz Allen, it was found that most executives thought corporate values were important but had no best practices for embedding values into operations.
How to Solve this Problem with Organization Design?
The key to solving this dilemma lies in understanding work levels.? When organization’s structure their organizations with exactly one role at each work level within a reporting chain, they create a design that allows for the natural flow of work, communication, and leadership.? Consequently, the aspiring, conceptual corporate values penned at the executive level are systematically broken into successively smaller chunks until they play out at the concrete, procedural-based face-to-customer level.
When poor design results in no role existing at a certain level of work, the translation chain becomes broken, as happens in flat organizations.? When more than one role exists in a given level, the translation chain becomes too heavy, as happens in overly layered organizations.
In these days when it’s stylish to bash hierarchies, I say misunderstand them at your peril and your customers’ peril too.
Tomorrow, I’ll share my unusual experience of being able to connect the dots between one company’s?corporate value statements on their website?and my actual experience with their face-to-the customer operations.
I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.
Filed Under Corporate Values, Executive Leadership, Organization Design, Requisite Organization
Comments
3 Responses to “Exceptional Customer Service Flows from Sound Organization Design”
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Hello Michelle,
even if everything is designed perfectly the system may not work if there’s some mid level manager who does not “live” values and use leadership ineffectivelly. These days this used to happen because individual puts his/her personal interests above organizational ones. However, it autonatically means that something is imperfect in the organizational design :)
When you fix the system, should you also think about “fixing” individuals who are the part of the system design?
Eugeny
Eugeny,
Thanks for the comment. Part of the total systems model I use as a basis for my work includes clarifying accountabilities and authorities.
Employees are accountable to give their best effort, to give their managers their best advice, and to stay within policy.
The model also has specific accountabilities for not only managers but managers-once-removed. Managers-once-removed are accountable to see that the managers working for them are exercising appropriate managerial leadership, which also has specific components. So when I say fix the system, it includes a boatload of components beyond organization design.
If a mid-level manager is leading ineffectively, it is the accountability of his/her manager to deal with it.
We really don’t have any business telling employees what to value, but we can expect them to follow an organization’s policies and use its systems which should be rooted in the organization’s values. When they take a role, they must commit to the behaviors necessary to carry out the role. If they don’t value the behaviors, they won’t be able to sustain their interest and likely won’t give full commitment.
But I still resist the notion that we need to fix employees. Clarifying accountabilties and authorities and then holding people accountable for acting in accordance with them is an appropriate corporate means for seeing values are adhered to.
Regards,
Michelle
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