egyii blog

The fundamental mistake that management in service organisations make is to assume that human interaction follows a set of fixed rules such that all staff should be able to provide outstanding service in exactly the same ways. This assumption leads to training programs which offer a ’scripted’ set of behaviours for all employees to follow in an attempt to create consistency of good customer relationships throughout a large organisation.

Let me summarise the story of Plowman’s State Bank, told in John H. Fleming and Jim Asplund’s book Human Sigma.

Ferdinand Gustafson founded Plowman’s State Bank in the early 20th century in a small town in the U.S. Gus and his employees created value by treating every customer interaction differently, so that each relationship with a customer was unique. The service provided to each customer was personal, individualized and, above all, authentic. As a result of this highly personal way of building customer relationships, the bank thrived and grew.

Of course, we all know that individualized, personal service is the key to creating value in the customer’s eyes. The challenge comes when we try to scale up this model across a large organisation.

As Plowman’s State Bank grew and opened more branches, it became less feasible for Gus and his small team to see everyone who did business with the bank. As he entrusted service delivery and relationship building to a growing number of selected associates, he noticed that in some branches service deteriorated while in others it remained of a high quality. As a result, customers could not be sure which version of Plowman’s State Bank they would encounter when they visited a particular branch – the poor service version or the excellent service version.

The obvious solution was to ensure consistency throughout the bank by applying the principles of quality control. Thus they tried to create hundreds of Gus clones by scripting service. They sent their staff on training programs which told them what to say and do through a set of specified scripts and steps. The result was that the steps to follow (how to interact with the customer) were emphasised over the desired outcome. As the authors of Human Sigma say, “Unfortunately, you can’t find the solution to building genuine customer connections in making the steps of service into a routine.”

In her book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, the late German social psychologist Fritz Heider described the concept of equifinality. To quote the authors of Human Sigma again, “In essence, equifinality describes that there are as many paths to achieving a desired outcome as there are people willing to try. No single path is appropriate for all individuals because the conditions required to reach the desired outcome are different for every individual. In other words, though the end remains constant, the means to achieve the end will inevitably vary from individual to individual.”

Needless to say, Plowman’s State Bank became just another bank indistinguishable from the rest. They lost their unique, key point of differentiation – their ability to create value in their customer’s eyes through the right kind of relationship management.

What can a service organisation do, then, to make sure they focus on a common outcome while allowing the journey to reach that outcome to vary from customer to customer and interaction to interaction? The solution is to free your people to express themselves in their own unique ways and tap into their individual talents and strenghts. And the way to do this is to provide them with powerful self-management and relationship-management tools which they can use as they see fit to create value for their organisation.

This is the new direction of people development today: a focus on the individual such that each staff member is motivated by being given the opportunity to fully express herself while building great, lasting customer relationships.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore