Recently, I had to go through the arduous yet entirely worthless process of interacting with the customer care center of a reputed telecom service provider company. I took a new connection and within 3 days they withdrew the connectivity citing improper documentation issue. The irony was that I took the connection from their authorized dealer where their representative took care of all the documentation part. When I called them up, the agent wanted me to visit the same dealer again and resubmit the same papers, while I believed that it was unfair on their part to ask this.

I am not arguing about who was right or wrong there, my point is quite different. During my several calls in this regard, one thing was obvious- the call center agent was in no position to help me in anyway. Though he could understand my point but could do nothing about it(even resuming my connectivity for 1 day while I resubmit the documents). Now how many times do we see such inefficiencies in the system? so often we come across processes or the IT system making the organization extremely rigid.

It is a fact that your system may render you inflexible and may cause lost opportunities, but that’s a huge area in itself. Even if we leave the money calculations aside there are still lots of soft aspects of this issue.

Just think about the work life of a security guard, or a call center employee who has a written script that he/she has to repeat again and again day after day, or for that matter a salesman at the retail store.. the list is just endless. We say that a company’s policy and systems are in place if its workers are more and more a replica of each other, If all of them behave like machines, very professional on the face of it but hardly human when seen in perspective.

The company becomes stable but in its quest of stability it strangles its employees and their individuality, the worst hits are the employees at the lower levels. They have a script for everything, how to great the customer, how to handle him, what to say while taking the credit card and so on. The processes and their manuals go from strength to strength but do they really serve the purpose with which they were instituted?

We always like when we are treated by real human beings, people who connects with us, who understands us. Suppose I have already done all the research. Now I am in a mood to book a particular model of LCD TV in 10 minutes as I have to I go to my office, I don’t want to hear to those annoying cross/up selling pitches from the salesman, and if I am in a mood of just checking the price I don’t want him to come to me and repeat those mugged up lines again and again.

Moreover it felt great (alas! It’s past) when your fruits weighed slightly more than 2 Kgs and the shopkeeper told you that it’s OK. When the customer care representative assures you that he will try his level best to do something in your favor and calls back after half an hour to tell you that it’s done.

So, there are possibilities when people don’t want all those standardizations (of course we want them in place in life safety issues like aviation, security checking etc)

The point is to have some faith in your employees, though the destination and the suggested path is to be shown, but please! Don’t decide where exactly they need to land their next foot. Give them a breathing space. They are the ones who will be interacting with your customers and they need to believe that it is their job, they need to enjoy it. They need to believe that they are creating some value for the customers.

Let your waiter serve a new dish to some of your regular guests on the pretext that they pay for it only if they like it.(fix some amount per day that he should not overshoot), let your customer care representative tell your customers “Sir I am activating it right now, but you please submit your bill by tonight” Give them some powers so that they can really help, guide, care for and sometimes even pleasantly surprise your customers. You are not empowering them for just making their job exciting but actually you are helping your customers by making them interact with real people and not with dejected human machines.

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