Every organization has a culture — good or bad. It can be defined as the traditions, attitudes and behaviors that are present in an organization. In my company’s support center, we focus on taking care of our restaurants. However, I noticed initially that the service desk had a slightly different culture, likely because the physical room that they’re in is pretty much isolated from the rest of the company.
I was asked to temporarily assume operations of the desk, prior to Easter of 2023. I remember getting called into HR in one of the first days in this role. Turns out that one of the supervisor’s had sent an email to our Chief People Officer complaining about having to have our service desk open on Easter, not necessarily because it was a religious holiday, but because our support center was closed on that day and he didn’t understand why we were not.
I thought about this email for a while. What would cause one of our leaders to send this? All of our restaurants are open on Easter. Who is supposed to support them if the service desk is not working? Diving in deeper, I started thinking about how the supervisor could be so insensitive to our internal customers to place his needs above theirs. Lastly, I wondered why they didn’t come to me first. I told our HR executive that I would handle it, but I thought that it might be a sign of a bigger issue.
I took some time to ask some of our agents their thoughts. While many understood, there were clearly some that did not. Time for action.
Early on in my retail career, I managed a discount department store, one location out of about 200 in the chain. On a busy Saturday, the server that controlled our POS system went down. All of the prices for items are on that server, so every item a customer wanted to buy, once scanned, now asked for a price and, of course, the prices were on shelf labels, not on the product. We had to have people literally run to the shelves to get prices to check people out. What a mess!
I called the company service desk and after waiting on hold seemingly forever, I remember being disconnected after I explained my issue. Calling back, I spoke with another agent who really didn’t seem to care less and was not very helpful. I was desperate. Customers were upset, employees were panicking and I was back in the office trying to work with an unhelpful service desk to fix a mess that they didn’t think was a big deal. I vowed that day that if I ever was in charge of a service desk, things would be different. Plain and simple: We would care.
Once I switched over into the IT world and had the opportunity to manage a service desk, I made customer service the central point of our purpose.
- Most of the retail/hospitality corporate office buildings in which I worked were called “Support Centers.” Support is what we do!
- I would tell my employees that by working in the support center, we were leaders in the company. By example, we need to set the tone for how they are to take care of their customers. If we treat our restaurants poorly, it gives our restaurants the license to do the same with their customers. That’s not acceptable.
- Our restaurants pay our salaries. Without them, there would be no jobs for us.
I have taken this with me throughout my 25 years in IT. If we want our store employees to treat our customers with respect and dignity, we, as leaders, must set the standard. If we tell a restaurant that we’re going to do something, we need to honor that commitment. Everything that we do needs to be completely focused on our internal customers. They are why we’re here.
Let’s back up to the Easter email. The reason why this bothered me so much was that someone in leadership thought that their needs were more important than their customers’ needs and that our customers should have to fend for themselves on a busy holiday, so they could have the day off.
His manager ended up sitting down with him and talking through this. I had a conversation with the entire service desk and used this as an opportunity to begin going down the road of changing our culture. Here are some things that I’ve done:
- I live it, everyday and without exception. If an agent needs something from me (they are my customer, too) I take care of it promptly. If I make a promise, I deliver on it consistently.I monitor the various chat queues that agents use to ask questions when they’re stumped. I help answer questions as I have time, even on nights and weekends (and on Easter). In short, I set the example.
- My expectation is that my leadership team does the same thing. One of the new initiatives that we rolled out last year was the creation of a “Supervisor on Duty” role. This role, rotated amongst the leadership team daily, provided for a dedicated leader to be available to agents (meaning not in meetings) to assist in any way needed. One of their other responsibilities is to handle incident escalations from our field leadership teams.
- We set up an email distribution list for any above restaurant leader to email us if they did not believe that an issue was not being resolved quickly enough or to their satisfaction. When we communicated out this new escalation procedure, we said that a response would come within 30 minutes of them hitting that distribution list (note that we didn’t say we’d resolve the issue in 30 minutes, just that we’d acknowledge it). The response to this program has been overwhelmingly positive from the field.
How does all of this relate to culture? We’re building a culture on our service desk where our internal customers come first. We have embedded this into our onboarding procedures (where they hear it from me personally) and we’re demonstrating it in all levels of our organization without fail. Our leadership team (and I) are demonstrating it daily to our agents and our agents are slowly coming around and demonstrating this to our restaurants. We have a ways to go and this although this culture change will take time, I like where we’re heading.