How to hire customer-centric employees?

by

Aurélie Chazal

culled from:https://www.linkedin.com
I recently wrote a piece about how real customer-centric companies don't not only say they are customer-centric but also show it to customers everyday.
Part of the process is to hire and train employees to adopt a "customer first" mindset. After all your employees are the ones facing customers everyday, and I am not only talking about your customer service department. In fact, I don't believe customer service should be limited to one department, it should be integrated in the company's values and be at the heart of every business.

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1. Base your final decision on soft skills

I never worked in HR but I had the chance to conduct or help conducting interviews on several occasions. Every time, I and my colleagues started by looking at hard skills on people's resumé. The truth is, we didn't receive thousands of resumés so we chose to call in people who didn't always have our ideal set of skills and diplomas.

I work in marketing so it's quite easy for us to hire people with different backgrounds and still find a way they can bring a very valuable skillset. In the end, doing so is what makes the company unique and gives it a chance to stand out of the crowd. However this doesn't mean we would just hire anyone. It just means we were looking at something different. We were looking for soft skills that would fit our company's culture. Doing so helps building cohesion in the team and will help the company adopt a specific voice in the long term. The same voice that will be used to talk to customers should it be through customer service, marketing, technical support or else.

The importance of soft skills in technical jobs

Lou Adler wrote an amazing article for Inc on the subject and how . In his article, Adler takes the example of a high-tech company from the Silicon Valley. The company had mastered the art of judging hard skills quite quickly but was struggling with assessing soft skills.
When Adler run a seminar for their HR team he took few examples of soft skills that are in the end crucial to a company's success. Among them:
- "constantly completing high quality work on time"
- "Appreciating the end-user's perspective from a UX and design standpoint"
- "Helping team members who are struggling"
- "Making presentations to customers, executives, and other internal teams"

We might not always consider those when interviewing potential employees but it seems obvious how important they are.

Customer service is 99% about soft skills

To come back to customer centricity, the idea is the same. Let's take the most obvious customer-centric position: customer service agent. You'll of course be looking at hard skills like language capacities or ability to use basic functions of a computer or phone system. But in the end, customer service is mostly a soft-skill centric job.

What soft skills do customer service reps really need?
- communication skills (empathy, listening skills, ability to engage in small talk with strangers, ability to give clear explanations...)
- team work skills (the will to help colleagues, the ability to listen and take others' ideas into consideration, being eager to learn...)
- self control skills (patience, ability to stay calm in stressful situations...)

How can you evaluate those skills?
Communication and self control skills can be assessed during the interview or a quick phone conversation. The situation might be a little more stressful for the applicant than a regular customer service call but most elements are the basic elements are the same: your applicant is talking to a stranger in a business environment. The stress can also help you evaluate the applicant's self control skills and give you a pretty good idea of how he would react in a stressful situation.
Team work skills are a bit harder to evaluate in a short amount of time. You can always ask questions like "In your opinion, what's the most challenging aspect of working within a team?" or team work related questions. If you want to make sure you are hiring the right person, you can always run a background check and call old employers after the last round of interviews.

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2. Consider culture fit

Zappos is so concerned about hiring employees that fit their corporate culture and core values that they decided to abandon job ads completely. Instead, they designed a system where people interested in joining their team can emerge themselves in their culture beforehand on their Zappos Insight Plateform. This way, they have a pool of potential employees, who are already familiar with the brand's culture and that they can contact when they have an opening.
I love this process but it can't work for everyone. The only way Zappos can make that work is because they have hundreds and hundreds of people wanting to join them. As a small company, this would be really hard to achieve. The alternative is to design the hiring process to attract and select people who would be a great fit for your company's culture.

Do you talk at all about your culture during the interview?

I had never really considered the "corporate culture" aspect of a job before I started looking for internships in small companies and start-ups. Almost all of them mention their culture and what they stand for. What really amazed me was how passionate most of them were. I remember very well sending applications to several communication agencies when I was looking for a long term internship during the first year of my Master Degree.

I had a precise location in mind as I didn't want the money I was spending on rent to go to waste and I started to panic a little as I still didn't find an internship few weeks before the beginning of the holiday period. So I did what a lot of people do and I sent dozens of applications to all the companies in the area that might hire me in their marketing department. I ended up getting several positive answers from communication agencies inviting me for an interview. Among them was a digital agency specialized in outdoor sports and activities. The owner really liked my resumé and was ready to hire me when I asked a final question: "Is being into outdoor sports important to work for you?". Her silence was worth all the words in the world. As I wasn't and will probably never be into outdoor activities, we ended up agreeing that I wouldn't feel at easy working there and that I would lack some core knowledge about the industry.
The truth is I was a fit if you considered my hard skills but I was the worst fit possible in terms of culture. In the end I would probably have turned down the job anyway but I am glad I asked that final question and I wish my interviewer would have asked it to me beforehand.

Culture is what will make customers love you

Most companies choose to have spokespeople to communicate their culture often forgetting about the rest of their employees. Don't forget that if the media might go through your official spokesperson, customers won't. And customers can go to the media or might even work for a big newspaper or website. Just look at the recent Comcast fiasco. The recordings were leaked by a journalist who contacted the company as a customer.
It is vital that everyone in your company has the same message to communicate. I would go even further, every employee should embody and communicate the same values, your company's values.
If you decide to adopt a customer centric mindset, make sure that helping customers is every employee's priority.

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3. Look for optimistic leaders

A very crucial part of building a customer-centric company is to try and have a positive peer pressure dynamic. No matter how big your company is, peer pressure will always influence your employees and how they evolve.
Negative peer pressure can have a tragic impact on companies and is unfortunatelly very common among front line employees. Let's say you start a job at a call center and are hear colleagues vent about "those stupid" customers on your very first break. Soon enough, you'll start doing the exact same just to fit in.

Why optimistic leaders?

Simply because they will tend to spread a more positive attitude. You can have pessimistic workers, that's really not a problems and it will even balance your team and help take better decisions but in the end, your leaders have to be more on the optimistic side.
In an article for Forbes, Carmine Gallo lists 5 reasons why optimistic people make better leaders:
- Optimists start businesses
- Optimists are inspiring communicators
- Optimists rally people for a better future
- Optimists see the big picture
- Optimists elicit super human efforts

Where pessimistic leaders tend to see obstacles, optimists will see opportunities and look at the whole path to success before killing an idea. The truth is there will always be obstacles and your employees are probably aware of those obstacles. Pointing them out can bring demotivation which will push employees to abandon ideas they were excited about and that could have worked.
In a group, optimists are the one spreading positive peer pressure, encouraging people to try new things and to always do better.

Optimistic yes, but realistic too

When I talk about optimists I don't mean people so detached from reality that they don't consider obstacles at all. I mean people aware of the reality but who have the ability to see the good side of a situation. Realistic Optimists will tend to try and find a solution to a problem rather than just considering the problem as unsolvable. And that's why they can create a very positive group dynamic.
In customer centric companies, these leaders will prevent teams from considering customers as stupid and will invite their coworkers to find a way to solve the customer's problem instead. In the end, it doesn't matter if you are smarter than the customer or not. In most cases, you just know more than him on the subject and that's normal. You're working for the company, not him. If you think someone asking an absurd or stupid question is just brainless, it will be communicated to the customer in the way you answer him and it will rightfully make him mad.
If you want to truly adopt a customer-centric mindset, you need leaders who see the best in people and treat them with respect. Someone who handles an angry customer thinking that he's probably having a bad day and is just taking out his anger on him will be more likely to bring the customer to calm down.


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