Donate the power : obsession management services
One of the best practices to emerge from the search for the principles of good service management, crystallizes into a word : empowerment. In French, donner du pouvoir. À Who? Aux acteurs au contact du client, ceux qui se trouvent en bas de l'organigramme et sont dotés de peu de pouvoir hiérarchique.
In those - frequent - cases where organizational processes need to be reconciled with customer expectations and capabilities, extending decision-making autonomy down to the lowest level of the organization means avoiding the refrain: “put me through to your manager!” It's at those moments when the success of a service is at stake - what Jan Carlzon called the “moments of truth” - that a manager is likely to feel the need to hand over the keys to the organization to his or her staff.
The former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) drew the consequences of this by calling for a fundamental reversal of power relationships in the service organization: “If you're not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” It's the responsibility (duty!) of front-line staff to satisfy the customer, and the responsibility (duty!) of management to serve employees in such a way that they can ensure customer satisfaction.
L'empowerment, it's a guarantee of being more customer-oriented, more responsive and more flexible, and it's exciting and rewarding for our employees... a no-brainer?
Towards total autonomy?
In fact, developments in the service economy point in this direction. The development of the collaborative economy is giving everyone the opportunity to offer their services and make the most of their resources (their car, their DIY skills, etc.). The groundswell that is the uberization of society is the most obvious symptom of this. If Uber's recruitment campaigns aimed at potential drivers are anything to go by, the promise of autonomy associated with entrepreneurship is clear and seductive: «be your own boss”!
This advent of an era of autonomy is not, however, without friction! There's another side to the protest, and it's that of repeated lawsuits, based precisely on workers' contestation of the autonomy they were promised (and the demand for recognition of their subordination), as they must follow the algorithm's instructions to the letter. Autonomy, then, is sometimes only a façade - or at least partial!
The limits of autonomy and the need for control should come as no surprise. Even less so in mass services, where they constitute a fundamental tension - well highlighted by Marek Korczysnski through his concept of customer-oriented bureaucracy. According to this English sociologist, this is an organization that tries to adapt to the diversity of its customers while maintaining standard processes. The McDonald's catchphrase “we want to treat each customer as an individual in sixty seconds or less” is a clear illustration of the structural tension between flexibility and standardization. However, this tension does not prevent us from raising the question of employee empowerment and decision-making latitude, and understanding the conditions under which this can be successfully achieved.
The real conditions for a empowerment successful
So how do you make the‘empowerment relationship players from service? How to ensure that autonomy and control are well balanced, to avoid bad surprises ? One thing is certain: the’autonomy can't be decreed. And we know well that many professionals who link ussmell have, at myns once in their professional lives, tryé to give power to their teams, without any follow-up.es effects or results expected. Based on our knowledge of the literature and our feedback from the field, we see three main conditions to be met.
First, we need to ensure a common framework of meaning at organizational level. In other words, we need to ensure that within the organization, a culture service-oriented customer is shared. This culture signals to employees the importance of satisfying the customer, and therefore gives themr the confidence to spend more time than usual (or standard) with a customer with a specific need, or to decide d’ignore a rule (e.g.emple a known customer who is not asked to present his card again).
The common framework of meaning can also be translated into what service management specialists call a “service climate”,
in other words employees' perception that everything in the organization is geared towards service (rules and standards, but also HR policies and space planning) !).
The second principle is to ensure that thes actors are equipped for their autonomy. Here, we think in terms of the workstation, by critically examining the work quotidien. It is not uncommon for management to decide tohe empowerment of actors field (perhaps in all sincerity), but without having checked the actual conditions under which the missions and tasks entrusted to them were carried out. The resources in question can be a tool (a customer file giving the information needed to make a decision relevant), uformal decision-making latitude (the software enablesso effectively from the reimbursement ceiling), time (the staffing being sufficient to take the time with a customer without generate a long queue), or skills development - such as Starbucks“ creation of a ”coffee master" training program.” por the'expertise of ses employees to make decisions as for beverage customization. Technological developments past and present have opened up new possibilities for enrich equipment agents CRM-type business applications offering resources (e.g. standard answers), or, more recently, conversational AI agents that debrief agents on the interaction they have just completed and anticipate the next steps. These examples illustrate the point, defined business ruleses for projectss deployment of CRM, marketing and sales tools can all be as support and reveal orientation the employee's customer than to weaken him irretrievably.
So the question for decision-makers is not just whether or not the organization has a tool, but whether or not that tool and the associated processes support autonomy and service excellence ... or not. .
Finally, thehe last principle is played out at the individual level. For the same position closest to the customer, in fact, there is a variability of people who occupy these positions. Each employee has his or her own personality and is part of a singular trajectory, conditioning a relationship with twork that more or less favors the desire for autonomy, the ability to assume the consequences of one's own responsibility, a commitment to customer satisfaction and trust in their own abilities. As actors can sometimes say in their own words, a service relationship is “very personal”. Some employees will be comfortable with the idea of deciding how to proceed, while keeping in mind the ultimate ambition of satisfying the customer's needs.ient, and others who will need to cling to a customer rule or policy to know how to react. Ensuring that each person is in phase with the process of’empowerment, it passes so through HR and managerial support – over a long period of time, personal development. It also means interactions with peers, which to every employee from find and adopt a work practice that suits them best. These individual developments, supported by management and workgroups, support the development of a service culture.
This article is part of a series of publications devoted to service culture, Arnaud Allesant (Associate Director at Eurogroup Consulting) and Jean-Baptiste Suquet (Teacher-researcher at NEOMA Business School) share their perspectives to explore concrete ways of developing a genuine service culture within organizations, whether public or private.
