The Truth

If you’ve been following the last two posts (assuming that anyone is reading any of these posts) you may have been asking why the management failures I’m describing keep happening. How could anyone be daft enough to issue contradictory orders to their employees? For that matter, why would anyone treat all of the customers (without whom we do not have a business) as though they were compulsive thieves who routinely steal everything that isn’t nailed down? I could make any number of nasty, sarcastic remarks at this point, but the truth is that like so many other things, operational management of any public-contact organization is harder than it looks…

Spend any length of time in any large retail store, for example, and you will come upon physical traces of shoplifting, such as the boxes expensive merchandise arrived in that have been emptied when the thief stashed the actual product on their person. If the store carries groceries you will find signs of “grazing” – people walking through the store, eating as they go, and then leaving without paying for any of their meal. Check out the back room and you will probably find evidence of employee fraud – all it takes is opportunity and the ability to rationalize the theft; even need is secondary. The only thing that will prevent either problem is an increased chance of getting caught; countermeasures like video cameras are useless if no one is ever monitoring their pictures, and the severity of the punishment threatened is irrelevant if no one will ever have to face those consequences…

It is possible to offset some of the theft problem with security tags and cameras, but the only fail-safe method is simply raising prices to cover the cost of the losses – and as noted elsewhere on this blog, any shoplifter who believes that the company won’t do this is kidding him or herself, and stealing from the community more than the store. You can beat the customer service contradiction by just accepting that some people are going to try cheating the company at the service desk and telling your supervisors to make the customer happy, no matter how absurd the customer’s demands happen to be. But if you want to combat any of these issues without simply shoveling money out the window, the only other choice is to get busy…

A manager who knows his or her employees can develop their people, promote and reward the good ones and eliminate the completely crooked. A good loss-prevention team can catch the most blatant thieves and fraudsters in the act, and thwart many of the others with simple active countermeasures like careful inventory control and locked displays. A management team that is committed to excellence in customer service can support their front-line personnel, take on the worst cases themselves, and never second-guess the unfortunate line supervisor who got stuck dealing with a “screamer” at some obscene hour of the morning. The problem is that all of these things take effort…

Now, no one who has ever done it would ever suggest that customer service management is easy. The hours are absurd, the conditions are terrible, and as the only exempt personnel in the company, the line managers are the lucky ones who get to deal with every extra detail for which the company does not have overtime hours available. Taking the time to walk the aisles and get to know everybody in the building at any given time is a huge drain on time and resources that you probably don’t have. But as I have noted on a number of occasions, if you study the dominant company in any given field it will probably be the firm with the best customer service, and in many cases it will also be listed as the best place to work. The bottom line is that we can blame lazy, thieving employees and greedy, thieving “customers” all we want to, but the success or failure of any company that makes its living off of direct interactions with the public is up to the management team. It’s on us…

It may be an unpleasant truth. But it is still the truth…