You have to be nice to customers now

It’s really sad when a scientific research project provides evidence that companies should be nice to their clients and it suddenly gets business folk to sit up and take note.

This is what happened when Harding and Yorke presented their findings. Their final finding was that if companies treat their customers like human beings your profits will increase dramatically.

In the real world of business what that means is that companies will have to ditch the call centres and start focusing back onto what the customers is actually saying. They have to remember the olden days where staff used to know their customer by name and reintroduce a two way conversation.

That could be a real blow to large companies who have been treating their customers almost like an overhead. Same thing that they were and are still doing to their staff. It seems that anything human has to be despised.

Now companies will have to set up departments that handle client concerns and actually mean it when they take up on enquiries and complaints. They can’t sweep it under the carpet anymore.

These consultants used something called an Empathy Index to measure the customer’s experience of the interaction. They proved that there is a direct correlation between showing empathy towards your customer and profitability.

The idea of an Empathy Index could be from a science fiction movie. Bizarre, one would imagine. But regrettably all bits of common sense has gone out of the corporate environment.

It seems that it’s not logical that if you treat your customer right she will come back for more. You have to have a study and some weird Empathy Index to prove what anybody with half a brain cell could understand instantly.

Why does all logic seem to leave the minds of senior management? It’s the same with the car manufacturers in the USA. They were constantly losing market share to small fuel efficient cars from Europe and the East. But none of the CEOs changed direction.

Now they are bankrupt and now suddenly they are going to start offering cars the customer wants. How many years did they not listen. How many years did they ignore the signs.

It’s the same with management studies. Business Schools make tons of money teaching CEOs how to manage people. Yet if one were to look at the logic behind the jargon it always boils down to the fact that if you treat your staff with respect, pay attention to them, praise them for good work (heaven forbid) you actually end up with a pretty good team of folk working for you.

It’s just pretty much common sense. It’s a pity that it’s something nobody in senior management seems to have any of. It could be that everytime you get promoted one more level up the ladder you have to leave a bit more of it behind. A prerequisite so to speak.