Demand Satisfaction!

This is the first of several interviews with featured speakers and panelists that will be at Customer Service is the New Marketing in February 2008. The first interview (with a format inspired by Inc. Magazine’s How I Did It feature) is with Alex Frankel, who will be speaking on “Living the Brand.”

Alex Frankel is the author of “Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee.” In writing his book, Alex took an unusual approach. Instead of interviewing people about what it was like to work at companies, he got jobs at those companies himself. In the interview below, he tells us about his experience and thoughts on customer service.

I got started working as a journalist more than a decade ago. When I was about 17, I met a guy who had worked as a UPS driver and he told me all about that job. He told me specifically about how much he had been analyzed and examined by some scientists sent from corporate headquarters: they had measured things like how long it took him to walk an average package to someone’s front door from his truck. The level to which they cared about such things intrigued me and from then on I knew I had to work for UPS some day, and to live the brand. One December I applied, and was hired.

The idea to write Punching In came after I had worked that hectic December delivering packages. I grew more interested in applying to work at other large retailers and service companies so that I could compare and contrast. I wanted to get a hands-on sense of what it would be like to be trained to be a caring, loyal employee by a company that had a stake in winning me over.

I went in with a feeling that all the frontline jobs I was applying to were jobs that essentially drew from the same talent pool, but I was completely wrong. Someone who elects to work at Starbucks is a very different person from someone who gets hired and stays on for ten years at UPS. There’s a self-selection process in play that I had not understood and that surprised me greatly.

Frontline employees are the face of many companies, they are the people who work directly with customers. When someone walks in off the street and into a Starbucks café or an Apple Store, that first impression they have after meeting an employee will create an idea in their head about what the company is all about. Now, more than ever, people are increasingly a strong strategic weapon companies use to attract customers, people are often more important than the service or product a company is selling.

In recent years, many companies have realized how critical their people are in terms of presenting a cohesive experience for customers. These days you see more companies that have happy, excited, and friendly workers in the critical customer-facing and welcoming positions and this is a direct result of new efforts by companies to ensure a higher level of service.

Working in that environment is interesting because by wearing the uniforms and undergoing the training you find yourself slipping into a new way of thinking and working. I went to work in a busy Starbucks in San Francisco and had an interesting experience a few weeks in. We were slammed, with a line of customers flowing out the front door. Sporting a green apron, I was in charge of ringing people up on the cash register. I motored for hours under duress but it was not until I was on my way home from work that I remembered that I didn’t actually work there, that I was in fact an undercover reporter. I had fully merged into the job at hand. Until you “live the brand,” as I did, you are really taking other people’s word for how they feel.

You cannot apprehend what it feels like to work a certain job unless you are wearing the uniform and living by the rules of a given employer. The subtle, or not so subtle, changes you feel when you put on a uniform and undergo training are extremely informative. For example, the feelings I had when I first changed into a brown UPS uniform and gazed at my reflection in the locker-room mirror were the kind of feelings you could not replicate by simply interviewing UPS workers about their jobs. (I tried doing so.) Subtle shifts are simply not apparent unless you are trying to be extremely observant, as I was.

Customer service means different things at different companies. I found workplaces where the employees work harder and do a better job because of the thinking that has gone into creating a great place for them to work. I think companies should be much more creative in their approaches and do things in a unique way instead of following consensus ways of operating. The Container Store hires great employees by using a totally original means of interviewing prospective employees. Similarly, Apple’s stores do a great job in training newly hired employees by offering a truly thorough and engaging process.

If you can attract customers to work for your company who arrive as fans of the company before they even start work, you are in good shape. If you don’t have a fan base like Apple does, the next best thing is to match a corporate culture as close as you can to the type of people who will end up working at your company or stores. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is filled with hard charging young achiever types and training is catered to that group specifically.

As told to Douglas Hanna.

Remember that there is still time to register for Customer Service is the New Marketing at the early bird price of $295. All the details can be found here.