At 2:30 in the morning, the night clerk at the hotel is a great help if you’ve locked yourself out of your room.
But if you want to complain about the hours of the gym, the hotel’s environmental footprint or even their late check-in policy, you’re almost certainly wasting their time. And yours.
Every organization with more than a few people in it has night clerks. Most of the people who work at the phone company, for example, and even the person clearing tables at the local pizza place.
It’s the night clerks that have the most customer interaction–in fact, they’re almost certainly the highest leveraged, most insightful marketing cohort in your organization.
They have information, and if we give them agency, they could transform the customer experience.
Alas, our systems rarely help. Many night clerks are underpaid and underappreciated, and systems around them push them not to care.
When your organization gets stuck, don’t blame them. Instead, find a way to help them become the contribution they’re capable of being.
Some useful questions you might not be asking:
How much does the information we’re not collecting cost us?
What is the customer service cost and brand dilution of depriving our people the freedom to take action?
If we built a culture of mutual respect with our night clerks–using training, compensation and engagement–what would our new customer experience and reputation be worth?
On a beautiful Sunday in Central Park, you’ll see thousands of people out for a jog.
Each person has exactly the right running style–and none of those styles are the same. Each is wearing what they think of as the right clothes, listening (or not) to the right sort of music, going in precisely the direction and at the pace they’ve chosen. They’re all correct.
And yet, they’re all different.
The same is true for the dogs they’ve chosen to adopt, the place where they’ve chosen to live, and what they plan to do when they’re done.
Given the chance, each of us chooses the right path. Based on who we are, what we believe and what we want, of course, that’s what we do.
The challenge of ‘everyone’ is that there’s no such thing.
We can search for the perfect option or settle for something better than we have right now.
The search for perfect never ends, and it’s a great place to hide.
Would you rather wait for the perfect job, or take this new one, which is better than the one you have?
The perfect leader is elusive, but we can probably find a better one.
When we produce better often enough, we get ever closer to the impossible perfect.
Highlighting the non-existent negative is confusing.
“Don’t be late,” isn’t as useful as, “We’re going to leave on time.”
“I don’t want to be rude, but…” can easily be replaced by simply saying something that isn’t rude.
And of course, “with all due respect…” is often the preface to something said without due respect.
Professionals take their work seriously.
Hobbyists can take it personally.
We arrive and make a promise. We do it on behalf of the client, and that promise has little to do with what we might want to do–it’s what they need us to do.
And so we make our promises carefully, and keep them with effort. That’s serious.
But it’s not personal.
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