Psychometric Testing - Best Practice?
With the current shortage of candidates in the job market many companies are now including psychometric assessments as part of their recruitment processes for selection and identifying job and company fit over just qualifications.
But are they using best practice to gain the most benefits from psychometric testing?
Attend this month's seminar to find out the theory behind best practice psychometric testing, what results are important and how best to use those results for the individual and the organisation.
Customer Service: A How-Not-To, and a How-To
The stories we hear and read about customer service these days should frighten any executive into making clandestine calls to her own office to check out what's really going on at home. It's an old trick, but if all CEOs made such calls on a regular basis, we might usher in a new age of enlightenment.
In spite of a proliferation of tales about bad customer service, some of them amplified on Web blogs to thousands of people, customer service horror stories continue.
From some of these incidents, we can divine this sure-fire philosophy for driving away customers:
- Never talk to them. Keep them on hold on the phone, and don't answer their e-mails. Tie them up in voice mail so that they never get to talk to a real person.
- If they persist in phoning in and demand to speak to a person, make sure they get transferred so that they have to repeat their problem again and again.
- Make them stand in a long line each time they visit your business.
- Tell your salespeople that it isn't important for them to know about your products, and don't ever empower a salesperson to solve a problem. Make your CSR go to four or five other people first.
- Reward the salesperson's surly attitude by never correcting it.
- Don't trust customers, for they are never right. If they tell you your product is defective, assume the problem is their fault.
I believe the old adage that customers vote with their feet. And with the cost of finding a new customer at 10 times the cost of retaining one, I don't think any of us can afford that kind of fancy footwork. I also believe that all of us, no matter the business or industry, must take a hard look at customer service. The problems don't populate just one business or industry; you can find them in banking, retail, health care, insurance and airlines.
Still, some companies don't get it. They have hired the wrong people, or gone to the self-service model of customer service, or made their customer service someone else's problem and called it outsourcing. They have pinched pennies, convinced they are saving money, when in reality they are losing customers and may eventually lose the store. Meanwhile, they hang up a sign that says, "Customers Come First" and hope that their employees get it.
The bad news is that no one ever gets anything from a sign like that; it's not that easy. The good news is that hiring the right people and training them is not impossible, either, and can make your organisation hum like a well-tuned engine.
As with any good professional practice, good customer service starts with a set of standards or values that the company wants employees to embrace when serving customers. Then our managers hire the people who most closely match those standards.
Assessments help identify job candidates whose attitudes match ours. Ideally, we all want to hire workers with the customer service "soul," perhaps imprinted on them by their mother or father when they were just babes. But it's not as obvious as Harry Potter's lightning bolt; you can't see this imprint just by looking at someone, or listening to her talk.
Once the right person is in the right position, managers can't just walk away, believing their job is done. The best companies offer employees continued, focused training in customer service.
As we all try to remain competitive while retaining customers, we must remember that people, both the customer and the one serving the customer, are the most important ingredients in the business equation. By all means, we should use every technological advancement available to further our goals in this increasingly complicated world. But in our haste, we cannot forget the people part. As one infuriated blogger wrote, "Without customers, there is no business."
Jim Sirbasku, CEO
Profiles International
