I’m reminded of my days at Nordstrom after reading Service Untitled’s post, “A Well Handled Situation by Amazon”. Nordstrom gave us the power to make decisions and do whatever we could do to make the customer happy. If it meant driving an hour and a half to another store to get a shoe for a customer who desperately needed it...Nordstrom let you do it. (True story! I did it!) If it meant giving a refund to customers even though they didn’t have a receipt... All within reason, of course. Management backed us up. We had power and I loved it.
Are you giving your employees the power to make decisions? Why or why not?
Hi Maria,
A very good question indeed. I personally enjoy it when employees are empowered to be proactive with a customer. However, there are some dangers with letting employees have too much flexibility with company policy...
1. The internet makes it much easier for someone to say that the rep broke with company policy.
2. If you do break policy, you would (in theory) have to do it for every customer that had a similar complaint.
I really think that breaking policy is something that needs to happen when a company does something terribly wrong, however. A company should also modify policies based on feedback that is coming into the customer service channel.
Posted by: Damon Billian | January 23, 2007 2:44 PM | Permalink to Comment