Press Release

Becoming More Risk Tolerant Can Improve Service Performance

To encourage frontline customer service staff to take risks, service managers must make it safe to fail. An award for the best mistake of the quarter can help.

(Boonton, NJ, June 4, 2010) — There are a lot of ways to measure service performance — and most identify the mistakes made in an organization.

"But if you want your organization to lead in customer service, you need to make it safe for employees to risk making a mistake," says Mindshare Technologies' president Richard D. Hanks.

In an article in the June issue of Customer Service Newsletter, Hanks discusses what and how to measure for improved service performance. He also offers the following ideas on how to make your organization more accepting of mistakes, and therefore, more risk tolerant:

• Create an award for best mistake of the quarter.
• Managers and senior executives should be willing to admit their own mistakes.
• Don't dwell on mistakes and who made them. Talk about what was learned and focus on the future.
• Make sure your public and private methods for dealing with mistakes are the same.
• Teach employees about great leaders whose eventual success followed multiple previous failures.
• Base bonuses on learning from mistakes (the improvement made), rather than just absolute scores.

While you don't want to encourage mistakes or needless risk taking, an empowered workforce that is willing to take a chance can go a long way toward setting your service apart from the pack.

###

About the Customer Service Group

For more than 20 years, the Customer Service Group has helped customer service, call center and help desk managers increase productivity, improve service quality and boost customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. The Customer Service Group publishes Customer Service Newsletter and The Customer Communicator.

Website: http://www.CustomerServiceGroup.com