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I hate scripting. I love jazz. One of the most important ingredients of a relationship-building encounter, as opposed to a relationship-diluting transaction, is that your customer feels you have created this moment just for him. You are not replaying past interactions; you are not working from a script. The encounter feels as if it is happening for the first time ever in the entire 15 billion year history of the universe. Sure, the best actors can make scripted lines sound fresh and spontaneous. But most people can't. However, many companies, unable to trust their employees to speak like normal human beings, insist on requiring those employees to follow scripts. Worse, they often grade employees on how well they follow the script. The result? The employee sounds scripted and the customer notices. It feels transactional to the customer, and the relationship is not advanced. The solution? Jazz. Huh? Jazz. Yes. Jazz. A group of jazz musicians can meet for the first time and immediately begin improvising together, creating great harmony. How is this possible? Because "improvise" doesn't mean complete, free-form "making it up." When jazzers improvise together they are working from a shared foundation of musical idioms and the harmonic and melodic structure of a particular song. Why can't the same thing happen with front-line employees? One of my favorite business-meeting memories is the moment when Mike Defrino, vice-president of operations for Kimpton Hotels, agreed to ditch the 15-point script that hotel front desk personnel were required to recite at check-in. "We don't need 15 points," said Mike, "We need one: engage with the customer." After that we defined what it means to engage a customer, and shared these principles, not policies, with employees. It made the front desk experience at Kimpton become more genuine-- encouraging relationship-building encounters with customers. A relationship-building encounter is never scripted. It is always fresh. It feels to the participants that the moment has never happened before. A script will always preclude freshness, unless you have Lawrence Olivier and Meryl Streep working as hourly front-line employees in your company. Take Notice As a customer, can you tell when a company's employee is speaking from a script? More interestingly, can you tell when an employee ditches the script and interacts with you in a genuine, spontaneous way? Over the next week, pay attention as you shop, dine at restaurants, speak with customer service agents over the phone or make purchases for your work. How do you compare? What are the underlying "jazz" principles in your company? What are the shared ideas -- the "DNA" of your customer interactions -- that make it possible for front-line people to act like front-line "people" and not front-line robots? Try this Inevitably, many times this week you will find yourself talking with a customer about a subject you have discussed many times before with other customers. It's tempting to rely on scripts you've used before in these situations, because the subject is so familiar to you. Try, consciously, to improvise a new way of talking about this subject. It's still the same subject, it's just a new, fresh way of approaching it.
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Click
to buy Steve's new book, We: The Ideal Customer Relationship “When
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