This bulletin just in. In an Obverse/Perverse Twist on the movie hit, Sleepless in Seattle, Care Bears were the object of two overnight incidents of bizarre gang violence. In suburban Baltimore, a cuddle-huddle of 5 Care Bears was taken out in a late night drive-by shooting on a busy Timonium street. Witnesses report a careening mid-1960s Mopar vehicle with major fins — either a Plymouth or a Dodge — containing heavily armed Gen-Xers. They were screaming something incoherent about NordicTrack giveaways. "Nordic Track Militia Madness" was spraypainted in florescent orange across the vehicle's side. Meanwhile, late at night in downtown Seattle's Pioneer Square, aging Boomers in business casual attire and carrying pitchforks and torches, impaled and flared a large mound of Care Bears with an eerie robotic jerkiness. Chanting in a sing-song style, "Heal Your Inner Child with a Care Bear Roast, a Care Bear Roast..," the Boomers frightened homeless winos in the area who fled hurriedly as the bonfire grew. Departing winos shook their fists, mumbling promises to file written complaints with the City's powerful Human Rights Commission. Cyberspace is chock full of angry threats against the cuddly toy that was so popular only a few years ago. No one seems to have a good explanation for what's going on, but Strategic Futures® opines that, absent intervention, the outlook for customer service quality may be less than favorable. Turning to other business news...

It must have been a cold and dreary night several years back when it became unfashionable to care about much of anything. Beyond a loss of fashion, however, some of us mysteriously misplaced the ability to care about much of anything. While some people pretend that today's cultural zeitgeist doesn't seep into the affairs of business, we don't play that game of make-believe at Strategic Futures®. What's going on in American society is inextricably intertwined with business. You can trust your car to the man who wears the star, the big, bright... What's going on has tremendous implications for service quality — now and later.

Hey, what about customers? Don't try to fool us. Who cares about customers' happiness anymore in an emergent scenario of indifference, burn-out, and melt-down? If you think that this is still the Father Knows Best zone, stop reading now. If you don't find any of this to be mildly strange, you should reduce your medication level promptly. What's the point? Point is, it's tough to motivate employees to deliver quality customer service during during any part of this century.

So who does care about customers' happiness anymore? If you have read this far, you probably do. You must be a business owner, leader, or manager of some kind. But how can you get your employees turned around to care half as much as you do? Or perhaps you are eking out a living as an anthropologist or historian...

At Strategic Futures®, we focus on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and the "revenue side" of business success. (Let younger consultants cut expenses, headcount, and other green eyeshade elements of financial denominators! Let those with youthful enthusiasm and visions of sugar plums "pencil" these budgets down to sub-lean levels).

[((When we work with a client, we proceed from the clean-slate assumption that relatively little is known about the customer and what makes the customer happy and unhappy. This tweaks client sensibilities a bit in the beginning, but they get real happy that we play it this way. We begin with a Discovery Phase. Working hand-in-hand and involving our client actively, we explore the likes and dislikes of the client's customers. We begin crafting measures for a Rolling Report Card of Customer Satisfaction. Knowing the "hot buttons" and "cold buttons" provides the basis for developing a Strategic Service Plan with the hands-on involvement of opinion leaders in your Firm. We help you begin working from a platform of more accurate, confident knowledge concerning customer needs and wants.

This sets the stage for lots of positive and powerful things to happen, e.g., for clarification of value-added throughout the organization relative to customer needs and wants, for development of new product/services that satisfy existing or anticipated customer expectations, and for blurring the boundaries between what we represent to customers with our marketing, advertising, and selling strategies, and what we represent to employees with training, coaching, performance appraisal and rewards. If this would not help your company, please stop reading.

Sifting out the rituals, red tape, and redundancies in the organization relative to customer value is a big part of the process, aye, but we digress: This article is about Customer Service Training in the Post-Care Bear Era, so hang on, here we go!))].

To be successful, customer service training needs to focus on the head, heart, and hands of the employee. It needs to be a comprehensive approach. We wouldn't want to be forced to choose one component over the others. However, if forced, all right put your weapon down you intellectual bully or I'm peeling the saran wrap off this Compton's Worldwide Encyclopedia volume purchased as a grocery store checkout impulse buy, we'd bet our chips on "heart" as the factor that is too often neglected in customer service improvement strategy and training efforts. If you can't insulate your team from the burn-out, melt-down, I-don't-care culture for the hours of the day that they serve your customers, you probably shouldn't get lost in the masquerade of customer service training. Turn back now if you must. Not only will the masquerade waste your time and money, but you'll shellack on a few new layers of quiet cynicism in the bad bargain that can't be removed successfully unless you do a full and complete staff transfusion and you have the stomach to do that, do you?

What's in it for me? That's the real question in the employee's mind that has to be answered before you can get to Go. The envelope please. And the answer is not eligibility for some bonus at the end of the year, at the end of time, or at the end of the rainbow. That may be nice but now that employers and employees can't care about one another as they once did, and as we even cease to wax nostalgically about the End of Loyalty, many employees work from the homo economicus assumption that they may not be in the company at bonus distribution time and not because the employer fired them but because they fired the employer first! So, Bogus Bonus Buffoonery is not an option. Except for time-challenged towns and cities in the Midwest where you have no right to interfere with their happiness: Don't tell them what's happened on either coast, OK?

What's in it for me? The envelope please. And the answer is not a Career Promotion. In today's flattened organization, with high-performance work systems and teams, teams, and more teams, we've stripped most of the rungs off the ladder so that it resembles something out of an old-time cartoon. Snuffy Smith-style big shoe stripping out ladder rungs while falling to the ground, accompanied by high-to-low xylophone sound, OK?

What's in it for me? The envelope please. And the answer is not the respect and admiration of management and peers because even though that may be nice, the employee wants to know what does this all mean? Does it mean a positive future reference from the employer? No. After all, to avoid litigation the company policy now is merely to confirm or deny that someone ever worked here and to say no more about it. We thank you.

What's in it for me? The envelope please. At this point, you should insert answers that have not worked drawn from your own company's experience. You should also be developing a faint aggravation about hearing about what won't work rather than what will. On the other hand, if you work in a large old-fashioned bureaucracy that practices Cybernetic Management where your job is to play a guessing game with your superiors this may not bother you yet. The Cybernetic Management game is where you focus on What It Is Not, rather than What It Is. Like with a thermostat for a furnace, the absence of something, e.g., heat, causes the machine to turn on. If you have not read Sartre's Being and Nothingness in its entirety, please skip this paragraph. Basically, it goes like this in the Big Bureaucracy: You attempt to guess the correct answer and the boss's job is to tell you that you have not yet guessed successfully. Despite your limitations, you should keep trying or you will leave the Road to Nowhere sooner than you should. Naturally, you understand that the boss cannot give you any clues as to the correct answer for reasons that cannot be revealed here.

OK, what can work? How about a promise that the customer service training offers the employee refreshed interpersonal skills that are useful in personal life and skills that are portable to the next employer, the next career, or an entrepreneurial business that s/he may start in the future?

The Ten Personal Power Skills

Research teaches that there are ten Personal Power Skills that relate to form, substance, personality, and action. These skills are a gift from your Firm to each employee. Even if they currently possess the Personal Power Skills, they will get better and stronger with the training. They will improve their ability to:

1. Manage first impressions.
   
2. Display depth of knowledge to build customer confidence.
   
3. Display breadth of knowledge to build customer relationships.
   
4. Show uncommon versatility in dealing with different personality types.
   
5. Call up enthusiasm with a snap of the fingers.
   
6. Step up to big-picture thinking.
   
7. Show an appropriate sense of humor at the right time. (Don't say to your customers: You should laugh at your problems, everybody else does!)
   
8. Turbo charge your self-esteem.
   
9. Take risks.
   
10. Call up creativity and apply it to give what the customer wants.

There is the need to equip employees to communicate more effectively with active listening and the use of open as well as closed questions when the time is right. What about ways in which personal power can be used to influence people positively? Tension management is key. Does your employee know how to use the Ring of Fire to insulate against the upset, possibly rageoholic customer? Does your employee know what all complaining customers really want? Or do you think that having this knowledge would take the "sport" out of winning and retaining customers both for the employee and your organization? The ability to manage tension is the Master Skill. Have you given this gift to your employees? This is all part of the correct curriculum — from Strategic Futures®.

So think about times that you have received exemplary service. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that these skills are the grist of the best customer service you have ever seen anywhere. If there's rocket science here, it's to be found in helping your people figure this out and apply these skills in your company!

A quality customer service training curriculum is a necessary but not sufficient condition for training success. And this is where the Heart comes in. It's about motivation. It's all about motivation. Bob Dole, we hardly knew ye. By itself, the curriculum delivered by a roll-the-mental-tape trainer is akin to the sound of one hand clapping. The real key is in the delivery. It must reach the audience and this requires that it be entertaining and that it be personal so that it really reaches right into the life of the employee. No, not like illegal nor with untoward behaviors, but with spirited delivery that shows that you care — about each individual. Remember? This is the way that good teaching once was before the meltdown of education, including the methods and manners that had shown themselves to work effectively over the years. What is good workmanlike quality in training? No, good "workpersonship" quality will not be written here because I insist that my daughters have every possible advantage. (Danger Danger return to main highway immediately and accelerate, brain police sirens approaching. It's official: I can't conform adequately). The instructor must bond with each training participant. A pre-training one-on-one confidential conversation between the instructor and each training participant to discover obstacles to participant learning, whether motivational or substantive is key. What's it going to take? Where do you want to go and how can this training help you? If you don't know where you want to go, what would it take to make this training sufficiently engaging so that you will stay conscious and work on these skills?

This is the advance work that needs to be done for each session delivery so that the instructor can really connect with each participant because effective customer service training is about behavioral change and you cannot influence the behavior of anyone if you do not understand their motivation and their mindset. Even if you do have this connection, you know that your odds are less than perfect. You know that this is true, so why would you permit any other approach to be purchased for use in your organization? Some of you remember going through a break-up or a divorce and some of you don't. You're not just going through the motions on customer service training, are you?

Then, there is the Head Work. Employees need to be able to identify the customers and what they value. Believe it or not, there are plenty of organizations where the employees cannot for the life of them identify who is the customer. If you doubt this, you should visit a government agency sometime. This is true in large corporate bureaucracies and you know that. What matters to the customer? Let's break the package of what the customer values into its component smithereens: Not just the somewhat obvious interpersonal dimensions, but sensory and environmental dimensions, along with other ways in which we make it easy or hard to assume the role of customer. What's more, let's equip employees with conceptual tools that help them communicate effectively with management about changing customer preferences and needs for product/service revamping and improvement. Managers and owners need to understand that customers change. Customers may think and behave differently than they did when you were delivering service directly. Things may have changed just a little. Maybe those customers don't care any more?!

Last but not least is the Hand Work. At Strategic Futures®, we believe that The 80-20 Rule works 80% of the time! High-quality customer service training should identify the 20% of all interactions with customers that are responsible for 80% of the satisfaction or alternately, irritation. This way you are "majoring in the majors" rather than "majoring in the minors." You are investing attention and effort where the payoffs in customer satisfaction are the greatest rather than focusing a lot of effort on what we call small 'taters or, perhaps pejoratively, 'tater tots. The training should take these transactions apart and put them back together again, x-raying the process thoroughly from womb to tomb. Behavior modeling using a tell-show-practice approach should provide each employee with the ability to perform flawless mechanics effortlessly so that s/he can work on the higher order interpersonal skills that upsell customers and build their loyalty to the extent that anyone cares about that anymore.

(No we're not trying to build the Stepford Employee but practice makes perfect, almost... If we promised complete perfection, we would, ipso facto, be imperfect so we won't do that. For more information, watch this space or better yet, care enough to message us using one or more of several media...)

Ron Gunn, management consultant, specializes in strategic management issues related to matrix management, business competition, business process reengineering and human resources. His work has been published by the American Management Association, The Futurist magazine, and in several trade association magazines and newsletters. He is a frequent speaker and trainer who consults to both business and government. Strategic Futures® is located in Alexandria, Virginia (voice: 703/836-8383; fax: 703/836-9192).