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 client which plays a fundamental role in obtaining a culture oriented to serve external customers. However, they also forget details and emotional aptitudes, such as empathy, in order to have an excellent customer service that emerges as a philosophy of life shared by all members of the organization.
“Nobody gives what they do not have” is a very common popular saying that has a lot of truth and applies to the concept of service. This is formed from childhood, when parents teach their children to always ask “please” and give “thanks.”
Also when children provide support in household chores, to the community in volunteer activities and / or when children watch one of their parents help an elderly person cross the track, give the seat on the bus to a woman pregnant or other empathic behavior.
The service to others has a great component in empathy that is not only “putting oneself in the shoes of the other” but goes beyond, is to understand honestly 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 shortcomings in these supportive and often supportive behaviors and you will be asked to provide a good service to the clients, he can not do it at the level that employers want, because he is not emotionally capable of doing 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 provided with training on techniques of Service and Loyalty to the client, will be sowing in fertile land and the fruits will be harvested within the company, that is, the collaborators will implant a culture oriented to the service and customer satisfaction. However, if there are people who have suffered from empathic shortcomings (empathy as well as other emotional aptitudes are susceptible to being developed), the concepts given in the training workshops will fall into a “bottomless sack”, since before they should be established. minimum empathic foundations to be able to capture more advanced concepts about services and loyalty 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 customer is terrible, resulting in a negative work environment and with all the implications that merits, Ex.
Lack of identification towards the company, low productivity, widespread discouragement due to distrust, etc. It is clear that the role of the department leader plays a relevant role in this, because if it is permissive in the face of the lack of support and solidarity among its members, it is implicitly endorsing a culture of not serving the internal client, becoming something per se. HE.
What we must do is to create ad hoc workshops that sow the seeds 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 to carry out a rigorous selection process that emphasizes discovering those empathic emotional aptitudes in the postulants to a position. On the other hand, senior management must ask themselves: are we equipped with emotional elements to provide a good service to my external clients ?, and before answering that question they should 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 senior management, oriented to serve our subordinates?
Recall that in this globalized and competitive world, and the transaction of goods alone do not achieve high levels of profitability and participation in the sustainable market and rising over time, but an intangible concept: The service in the pre and post sale.
Sigmund Freud said it several years ago “the human being has 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 as we appeal to the value of humility in our actions as existential philosophy.
To conclude “nobody gives what they do not have” if within an organization there is an atmosphere of lack of internal customer service, what can external customers expect to receive. It is a relationship of almost cause and effect.
