I wonder what has happened to the concept of serving customers. These days, dealing with "service" employees can be an exercise in frustration. Yes, we've all been inconvenienced by poor service. But how does it impact your business when your employees fail to give less than stellar service?

The "customer experience" can make or break a business. You know that when your customers have a difficult time getting what they want and need, they'll go elsewhere. This is especially true today. The consumer is faced with so many options, it's critical to not only meet their needs, but to make the experience so enjoyable they tell their friends.

Growth through referrals is the cheapest way to grow a business. When a customer is "wowed" by their experience, they'll be that much more likely to forgive the occasional transgressions. They become so loyal, they return to repeat their experience and could be described as evangelists for your business.

Hoping to find a way to help QSRs and retailers improve future customer service experiences, we decided to find out what characteristics great customer service people have in common. As always, we approached the issue from a research perspective. We wanted to be able to definitively predict the performance of applicants. To do that, we first had to learn what common characteristics top performers share.

Here's how we did it. We decided to approach an existing QSR client and ask them if they would agree to be our "guinea pig". They gave us access to over 400 service people (servers, drive-thru order takers, cashiers, etc.). Then they had each server's direct supervisor rate the person in terms of service. The supervisors were asked:
1) "Overall, how would you rate this person's performance" and
2) "Knowing what you know now, would you rehire this person?"

The analysis of the relationship between a service person's scores on the Serv-Staff Assessor and their performance as perceived by their manager yielded some very interesting findings.

Our initial assumption was that to be a high performing person in a service environment, you would need the following 5 personality traits:

1) Friendliness - An employee's lack of comfort talking to others is readily apparent to customers and may lead customers, in turn, to avoid interaction necessary for a successful sales or service encounter. Customers generally prefer employees, especially those in service roles to be friendly, joyful and quick to warm up to others.

2) Integrity - Employers want an individual who can be trusted handling cash and inventory, while customers want to deal with individuals who will not try to cheat them and will deal with them in an ethical manner.

3) Conscientiousness - When selecting employees, one of the characteristics that employers look for in candidates is “Conscientiousness”. In other words they would like to identify employees  that perform tasks assigned them completely and on time. 

4) Calmness - Dealing with customers is often a very frustrating experience. As a result, it is important for employees with a lot of customer contact be slow to anger, and not easily annoyed.

5) Competence - Employers tend to value employees that have the characteristics included in the Competence scale. For instance, they look for employees who learn quickly, show persistence, know how to apply knowledge and need things explained only once.

The research showed that the best predictor of performance was "Conscientiousness" with "Competence" running a very close second. "Friendliness" and "Integrity" and, less so, "Calmness" were also found to have strong relationships with performance.

Part of this was unsurprising since there's been a lot of research that points to "Conscientiousness" being a big predictor of performance in any job. The inclusion of "Competence" also makes sense.

What was surprising was the relative unimportance of "Friendliness" and "Calmness". Yes, there was a correlation between these scales and performance, but nowhere near as large as we had anticipated.

Keeping these relationships in mind, we were able to develop a "Predictor Score". Comparing the "Predictor Score" to the performance of the respondents, we found that servers with higher scores on the "Predictor Score" were also
rated as higher performers by their managers.

When all is said and done, what we learned is that when hiring service staff, it is extremely important to pay extra attention to how "Conscientious" and "Competent" an applicant is.

But that can be difficult to do unless the person doing the hiring spends a lot of time interviewing an applicant.

If you recall, one of the goals of the research was to find out if we could develop a tool that could help identify if an applicant "has what it takes" to be successful as a service person. We're very pleased that, from this research we've developed the Serv-Staff Assessor.

Understanding as we do how sensitive hiring costs are to retailers, especially small locations, in the interests of possibly improving service levels around the country, we've decided on an extremely low price point for the Serv-Staff Assessor.

But we're not going to tell you what it is in this article. For that, you'll have to call me. When you call, we'll be happy to send you a sample report and discuss pricing.

Hope to hear from you soon! Maybe together we can make a positive impact on the service levels we all experience.