COS

NEWS

Here’s a quote from Julie, a saleswoman at a leading retail chain. Julie seems happy, fulfilled and “in her place”. As luck would have it, this company is exemplary in terms of customer culture (and customer satisfaction).

For the same or higher salary, would you be OK taking a job where you’d be in contact with customers every day?

Unfortunately, regardless of pay, “customer contact” jobs are undervalued.

Sociologist Michael Lipsky has popularized the term “street level bureaucracy”, referring to the difficulties and specificities of working as a civil servant in contact with users, and highlighting the discrepancies between public policies managed from the top of the hierarchy on the one hand, and the difficulties of day-to-day customer relations on the other.

As far as companies are concerned, jobs that involve dealing with customers (either physically or remotely) also have a peculiarity that poses a problem in terms of the meaning (mission) that companies give themselves.

These “contact” positions are very often considered to be at the “bottom of the ladder” in the company. Of course, this is the “bottom of the ladder” in terms of responsibility and salary, but also – and this is the point we want to make – the “bottom of the ladder” in terms of recognition.
Those with the least qualifications and the least experience are going to occupy those positions that nobody wants.

What nonsense when you want to be a company that takes care of its customers and puts them at the heart of its concerns.

Frontline teams need to feel supported (listened to – helped by tools and processes that facilitate their work), useful (understand their place in the company’s overall performance), valued (stop looking down on them).

I spend a lot of time helping companies to develop their customer culture, and along the way I’ve come to realize that the image of customer-facing professions is a key issue.

Are you sure that all customer-facing employees in your company are proud of what they do, and feel supported by their colleagues in the rest of the company? Here’s a field of investigation that drives us.