Tagged : leadership

in Culture, Customer Service, Management

Providing Customer Service on Holidays

Holidays can often be a challenge for organizations that offer 24/7 support. A customer service focused organizations realize that their customers have needs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This means that even during the holidays, there will be customer who need service. Often times customers may be in countries not celebrating the same holiday as the country where your support staff is located, but you still need to support them.

Real Appreciation for 24/7 Customer Support

It’s easy to say 24/7 but on holidays when most people are at home, spending time with family, eating great food, watching football, that you really gain an appreciation for the great people that sacrifice all of that to staff the 24/7 call centers we choose to set up.

Create a Tradition, Celebrate Holidays at Work

Although it’s not easy to have to work when most people are enjoying time off, we should always encourage employees to make it a festive time at work by:

  • Provide a GREAT incentive for staff members (Time and a half, plus another day off)
  • Decorating the workplace in anticipation for the holiday.
  • Creating a tradition at work during the holiday, like a pot-luck lunch/dinner with other staff members working.
  • Order in pizza or other food for the staff working on that day.
  • Having employees who support customers offer special holiday greetings.

I want to wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all of the unsung heroes out there today and tonight working at the 24/7 call centers, support teams, and network operation centers out there. You are rock stars!

in Development, Leadership, Management

The Steve Jobs School of Management

Gary Hamel’s The Future Manager discusses the needs and challenges that management will face in the future in order to remain relevant and be able to meet requirements of more technical consumers and to best utilize the resources to meet the needs of users and employees. Steve Jobs was a management visionary, extremely able to unite people and systems to accomplish the goals of the organization and turn out products people love.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects.

And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

-Steve Jobs

The fundamental changes that future managers will need to make will center on:

  1. Creating a democracy of ideas before making decisions.
  2. Amplifying human imagination to see new ways of doing things.
  3. Dynamically re-allocating resources to use things where they fit best.
  4. Aggregating collective wisdom and learning from what has been done.
  5. Minimizing the drag of old models; operating more “outside the box”.
  6. Expanding the size of the group that participates in the decision making and feedback process of projects.

I would add one more to this list of principles that future managers will need to espouse:

7. Making a personal connection with your user-base. Putting a face (or faces) to the organization since users want to make personal connections and interact with their service providers. Be a Steve Jobs in your field.