Teaching your employees to engage with your customers is your single biggest opportunity and it is free. Get this right and your business results will soar.
I believe that your biggest opportunity for leaders is still in making sure that every single employee understands his or her expectations for their role in the show. Remember that in your business the big red curtain opens everyday. Are all of your employees ready to put on the performance of their lives? The biggest opportunity is at the front line where the employee interacts with your customers.
It might be easy as a front-line managers to think that you don’t have time to focus on this or to think that it really would not make that much of a difference. We all have so much to do that it would be easy to put this part of your responsibility off . . . and just get the things done . . . and not focus on inspiring your employees to be great at interacting with your customers. Engaging with your customers is different than just being friendly or courteous:
Engagement means eyeball-to-eyeball contact and an interaction that leaves the customer remembering the employee fondly.
One way to inspire and gain commitment from each and every employee is to create:
- A healthy environment and
- Strong relationships with each and every person who reports to you.
A healthy environment is one where all employeess feel special, are treated as individuals, are fully respected, and are being given the opportunity to be developed and educated . . . and where their managers have a full understanding of the physical and emotional difficulty of their roles.
If you can do this, then you will have created a healthy environment; and you will have created special relationships with your team—and I assure you that this kind of environment is difficult to walk away from. When this kind of environment exists, your customers receive awesome attention and service that is individualized and sincere.
Your organization cannot be as great as it could be until each and every employee is on board mentally.
The main person responsible for creating the kind of environment I am talking about is each one of YOU who are leaders. The employees being led also have a responsibility to show their leadership by being great leaders within their teams by showing cooperation and by being great followers as well….Lee