Be cautious about subcontracting your greetings and your farewells. Of course, subcontracting is often a necessary part of business: properly handled, it can be appropriate and desirable. But such arrangements can also be Trojan Horses, filled with enemies of your cause who ransack the precious goodwill of your customers - sometimes even before the customers quite make it at your doorstep.
We are being melodramatic in our language about this to make sure you mark our words with special care: The quality of the subcontractor's entire staff, their selection process, their training standards, their appearance and grooming, their code of conduct - everything - has to be absolutely integrated with your own. From the point of view of customers, if employee wears the company logo or answers their calls or opens the doors for them, that employee is your employee.
To make matters much worse, so many of these subcontracting - gone wrong happen at hellos and good byes. the rationales do not help:" Oh, he works for the security company"; "Oh, they are the parking subcontractors"; " I am sorry she barked at you on the phone- she is a temp."
In essence, such statements are a way of coaxing customers to accept the idea that "that is not us". To your customers, such statements are just infuriating baloney. "If I buy a product from you", explained one such customer, "and it's serviced by somebody else you hired, well, I am sorry; to me that is your service." And if that rough service happens at an entry or exit point, it is harming a critical, emotion-filled moment that has a strong hand in shaping your customer's perception of your brand.
No comments:
Post a Comment