Margie Middleton & Associates: Smart Planning to Enable Committed Customer Champions!
The Cat in the Hat! An eccentric and anarchic character that always shows up when children are bored, constrained, unstimulated … and chaos ensues!
When we first deploy customer facing employees, we do everything we can to inspire and excite them about the opportunities open to them – if only they follow the rules and take accountability! Then we place them in an environment saturated with policies, processes and procedures that they must follow or else face the dreaded wrath of the quality controller! But who are these rules serving? Customers? The Business? Management?
If the Cat in the Hat teaches us anything it is that the only creative purpose that oppressive rules serve is to teach us the imperative of “Do whatever you like … just don’t get caught!”
Rules are needed to provide a framework and structure to activity. If these rules are poorly designed and managed they become over-controlling and suppress any individual thought and creativity. This results in the employee disengaging and becoming an obstruction to customer service rather than a facilitator that helps customers. So how do we design and implement structure in a way that doesn’t become overbearing and oppressive? How do we ensure that our need to control doesn’t undermine the potential for enthusiasm and customer engagement that we all know is central to meeting customer needs?
Key Take-Outs
- Getting to grips with what customers really want.
- Understanding the give-and-take between what business wants from the employee and what the employee wants from the business.
- How to set a framework of processes and procedures that help the employee to help the customer.
- Designing workflow that is seamless and releases human potential into problem solving rather than thoughtless compliance to control mechanisms.
Presenter: Margie Middleton
Margie Middleton is a dynamic and creative people’s person with the results-orientation and problem solving ability of a natural leader. She has an orientation towards strategic management where her experience gained from diverse line management positions across service industries can best be applied. With a background as a risk underwriter, Margie has well-rounded general management ability and good analytical, organisational, inter-personal and communications skills. These support her specific belief in the power of excellent customer management strategies to create and sustain competitive advantage. Her particular expertise is in building capacity and frontline support for the operationalisation of strategy.
Margie currently heads up a consulting and training company specialising in customer management strategies. She is an accredited trainer and acts as an advisor to senior management in various organisations. She is a sought after public speaker and her energy, passion and forthright opinions have been recognised in her being rated amongst the best presenters at various industry conferences both locally & abroad. She attributes this to an attitude of “get honest, get real and get practical”.
Her combined training in risk analysis and her academic studies in applied psychology enable Margie to identify, develop and implement the practical nuts and bolts of systemic processes and procedures in a way that is meaningful and accessible to the employees who use these. Margie is perfectly positioned to blend the “art and science” of contact centre and customer management into practical, accessible and sustainable solutions for effective contact centre performance management.