As many of you probably know, CEB Customer Contact set out to study the culture of service organizations as our major research initiative this year. In our survey we asked nearly 10,000 reps to describe in one word both their current and ideal organizational cultures. To our surprise, an overwhelming number of reps actually described their current and ideal culture in the SAME one word. However, it does not mean that most service organizations have already created the ideal culture for their reps to work in. Let’s take a closer look at each of the word clouds below to see how the same word can mean very different things.
Current Culture Ideal Culture
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
One reason why I like word clouds is that the finding is very self-explanatory. As you can see from the left graph (which shows reps’ descriptions of the current culture in their service organizations), the word Efficient absolutely stands out. But don’t celebrate too early because if you look at other frequently used words around it – Stressful, Inconsistent, Busy, Challenging, and etc., it almost tells you that the current efficiency you have may have come at a price.
Service organizations are trying to be efficient at everything – issue resolution, quality assurance, training, cost-savings, etc. However, having so many goals to achieve, we are essentially putting a lot of burden on reps. Indeed, nearly half of reps (48.6%) we surveyed this year agreed that they had to put in a great deal of energy to handle customer issues.
Clearly, that’s not what your reps (or you!) want.
Looking at the ideal culture words on the right, it turns out that reps do embrace Efficiency here too. But this time efficiency comes with Consistency and Ease. Indeed, reps will become more efficient at serving customers when service organizations have made it easy for reps to deliver that service.
So keep that in mind when you are thinking about your operational strategies – do not add more burden on your reps but create an easy and efficient environment toward the goal both you and your reps want.
Related CEB Customer Contact Resources:
Increasing Employee Engagement
Create an Environment to Enable Rep Performance
