Faced with the demands of multinationals for trying to build customer loyalty through actions that seek to obtain good service per se, we leave aside the internal customer, who plays a fundamental role in obtaining a culture aimed at serving external customers, However, they also forget details and emotional skills, such as empathy, in order to have excellent customer service that emerges as a philosophy of life shared by all members of the organization.
"Nobody gives what they don't have" is a very common popular saying that has a lot of truth and that is applied to the concept of service. This is formed from childhood, when parents teach their children to always ask "please" and say "thank you".
Also when children provide support in household chores, towards the community in volunteer activities and / or when children watch one of their parents help an elderly person cross the track, give up the seat on the bus to a woman. pregnant or other empathetic behavior.
Service to others has a great component in empathy that is not only "putting yourself in the other's shoes" but goes further, it is to truly understand what the other person (client) is feeling and above all perceiving.
Providing support, learned in childhood, has a fundamental impact on the future of a contemporary worker, since if there are deficiencies in these supportive and often supportive behaviors, you will be asked to provide good service to clients, he will not be able to do it at the level employers want, because he is not emotionally fit to do it.
So what to do? I know that many readers will be thinking that the answer is training and the real answer is: yes and no; Since being able to serve and training in Customer Service and Loyalty techniques is provided, it will be sown in fertile soil and the fruits will be harvested within the company, that is, the collaborators will implement a service-oriented culture and customer satisfaction. However, if you have people who have suffered from empathic deficiencies (empathy as well as other emotional abilities are susceptible of being developed) the concepts given in the training workshops will fall into a “bottomless sack”, since the minimal empathetic foundations to capture more advanced concepts of loyalty services and strategies.
Within this conjuncture we look within the organization, that is why many times the service between different departments or areas, in terms of attention to the internal client is lousy, bringing as a consequence a negative work climate and with all the implications that this merits, ex.
Lack of identification with the company, low productivity, general discouragement due to mistrust, etc. Of course, the role of the department leader plays a relevant role in this, because if he is permissive in the face of behaviors of lack of support and solidarity among his members, he is implicitly endorsing a culture of non-service to the internal client, constituting something per I know.
What we must do is develop ad hoc workshops that sow the seed of empathy in all the members of the company, emphasize in the heads of each area of the organization not to allow subordinates attitudes of lack of support among its members, deficit of solidarity, gossip and ill-intentioned comments, etc., and above all, carry out a rigorous selection process that emphasizes discovering these empathic emotional aptitudes in applicants for office. On the other hand, senior management must ask themselves: are we endowed with emotional elements to provide good service to my external clients? And before answering that question, they must know their starting point: what is the level of empathy of the members of my organization ?, also answer the following additional questions:Is my recruitment process aimed at discovering empathic skills in my candidates? Are we as top management oriented to serve our subordinates?
Let us remember that in this globalized and competitive world, the transaction of goods alone does not achieve high levels of profitability and participation in the sustainable and ascending market over time, but rather an intangible concept: Service in pre and post sales.
Sigmund Freud said it several years ago "human beings have the desire to feel important" and by serving we make the client feel special (both internal and external) and also makes us great as human beings since we appeal to the value of humility in our actions as an existential philosophy.
To conclude "nobody gives what they don't have" if an environment of lack of internal customer service is experienced within an organization, what can external customers expect to receive. It is an almost cause and effect relationship.
