NFIB

Put Employees on the Front Line
05/ 03/ 2004


The heart and soul of your business is the relationships your company forms with customers. It doesn't matter if your organization is retail, wholesale, or service based -- every dollar brought incomes from customers in one form or another. For this reason, all of a company's employees need to experience from time to time exactly how the business interacts with and services customers. In today's Workshop, Jeffrey Moses shows how even your back-office staff can benefit by direct customer contact.

Your sales force and customer representatives, of course, experience customer relations all the time. But many employees may never come into direct contact with a customer. Bringing these employees "to the front line," if only for an hour or two once in awhile, can rev up your organization and give everyone a more complete understanding of what the business is really all about.

Back office production personnel, secretaries, managers and even top executives can be put in direct contact with customers by assigning them to work with (or at least sit with) sales reps or customer service reps for half a day or so every month. The purpose is to allow everyone to experience first hand what customers need and ask for -- and what sales and customer service reps have in their arsenals to address these customer needs.

Assign specific times for back office personnel to work with sales and customer reps. Rotate assignments among your staff, so that back office personnel get out from behind their desks for some time every month. If a salesperson is going out on a series of calls, for example, assign a back office worker to go along. Or set a specific time for a secretary or production worker to sit with customer service reps and listen into customer phone calls. The back office people don't have to actually participate in the sales presentations or customer calls, of course. The important thing is to get them out and in touch with customers.

Gradually, you may notice that a new feeling emerges throughout your company as a result of these activities. Once all members of your organization realize that everything they undertake relates to customer contact, they will begin to have a new appreciation of the importance of their own activities, and see how their responsibilities fit in with the overall long-term and short-term goals of the company.

Once back office staff have the chance to work more directly with customers, they may come up with creative ideas about ways to give front line reps more of what they need to makes sales or to increase service. These may include ideas on how to streamline the flow of information or products -- or even ideas to initiate new products. Because of this, encourage suggestions from staff on a regular basis.

To keep customer-awareness momentum, bring sales staff and customer service reps into company meetings and encourage them to speak about recent experiences they've had. This will help you keep back office staff in ongoing touch with front line activities.

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