source: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/02/can_you_teach_s.html

Can you teach someone to care?

Obviously you can teach customer service skills. You can teach active listening. But can you teach them to care? No.

But you can infect them.

Passion is infectious, and so is caring. The brain usually can’t help sliding toward the behaviors of those that brain is around. So if you want people to care, make sure the culture of your environment has hit a critical mass of caring.

[...] Each of the several thousand employees in the entire company had to go through the same customer service training program. But we noticed that at some facilities, virtually 100% of the employees were nice-as-pie to the customers, while in a couple other facilities, you’d think it would kill some of the front desk staff to even smile at a customer let alone help them out with anything. What was the difference?

Critical mass. In the places where the service was awesome, the norm was to treat the customers like gems. If a new employee started working the front desk, for example, and didn’t say goodbye to a customer as they walked out, everyone noticed. The rest of the people there would turn around with an odd look. Not a condescending or angry look, just… that it was strange to not hear someone say goodbye to a customer. The norm was to greet and say goodbye to customers, and anything that violated the norm was really noticeable.

But in places where the service sucked, that culture didn’t exist. If a new employee started working the desk and didn’t greet a customer, nobody noticed. Nothing out of the ordinary.

We fixed the situation in less than two weeks by taking the front desk employees who couldn’t imagine not greeting the customers and sent enough of them out to the other facilities until we thought we had critical mass. It worked.

There’s another question, of course, which is, “Yeah, but weren’t they just being fake and going through the motions?” [...] But that’s where the brain kicks in… because the brain can get “infected” by an attitude of caring. It’s not guaranteed, of course, but just as having a teacher or friend who is enthusiastic about something can eventually cause you to start genuinely liking that thing, you can be infected by being around enough people who really do make caring a top priority.

The tougher job is when you don’t have critical mass and you somehow have to get there. And that’s when you need to bring in The Big Guns… real customers. Most often, when people don’t care about the users, it’s because they don’t see users as real people. They’re just abstract concepts. But if forced to meet one face-to-face, or at least see some in a video talking about real needs, hopes, dreams, concerns, they’ll have to start seeing them as real humans. [...]

So you can’t teach caring (although you can certainly teach ways to demonstrate caring to users), but you can use the brain’s built-in tendency to model what it sees in others to infect the newcomers. And by finding ways to keep users “real people” instead of spreadsheet numbers, a critical caring mass shouldn’t be that tough to hit.

I heart users : )

Posted by Kathy Sierra on February 28, 2005 | Permalink

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Comments [on original]

[...]

Can I be a fly in the ointment here? I like your post [...] BUT

I feel for the sales reps working for minimum wage a Reebok, who have to Be “up” all the time. [...] After all, often it doesn’t even feel like “their door” as much as managerspeak may try to convince them that their work is their home.

I also think that it is possible to care passionately about your customers, while feeling increasingly apathetic towards the work you do. If you don’t feel like your work is valued by your company – why should you care whether they make more money or not?

I do agree with your post. It is important to be a passionate person, and even more important to be passionate about others but I do feel like your example was exactly what the big companies [...] say when they want their employees to tow the corporate line in the name of the almighty dollar. [...] Posted by: Jay | Feb 28, 2005 1:17:35 PM

The above are excerpts from an article on Creating Passionate Users (no longer active) and excerpts from its responses.

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Categories: Caregiving
Tags » Caregiving | found | leadership

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