Fixing What's Not Broken

I realized last week that I was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. During my day job I coach and monitor Phone Reps for quality and customer service. In the past 6 months I acquired our Sales team that consists of 6 men that have never been monitored before. Needless to say they didn’t take kindly to little old me coaching them on how to improve their calls. I have been giving them feedback on what quality attributes to say in a call to make it a perfect service call according to industry standards. My feedback has gone unheeded and the group’s average “score” has been consistently below standard. Each week I give the phone Rep’s their “scored call” and each week they have gotten worse and worse.

I went home last week and I was thinking about it after work. It was another week of terrible service calls and I was wracking my brain thinking of how I could get through to these Reps to just do it. Say what need the company is looking for and improve your calls. I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t implementing these qualities, as it isn’t hard to do.

It hit me like a thunderbolt that advising them what to say isn’t what these guys needed. They knew what to say, when I gave them feedback, I would hear, “I know”. I was focusing on the wrong issue. Their spirits were broken. That was the underlying problem, not knowing what to say or not to say to a caller. What they needed to hear was positive reinforcement instead of negative. I decided to hand write Thank you notes to each person and focused on thanking them for one good quality that each man brought to his work. Our company has e-cards that we can send to employees but I decided that a hand written, personal delivered card would be more meaningful. All I had was pink polka dotted cards that I use for my women’s groups but I wanted to hand them out immediately so I used what I had.

I wasn’t really sure what reaction I was going to get and didn’t really expect one either way. To my utter surprise and delight one Sales Rep after another came up to me and thanked me for my thoughtful and unexpected gesture. One stood in front of all of my co-workers and told me how nice it was to get the thank you card. Another one e-mailed me and told me it was a very nice touch and how much he appreciated it. With one small gesture their spirits were on the mend.

Take a look at your own life. Are you trying to fix something that isn’t broken?

If you would like to write me with an experience that you have had with this topic, I would love to hear from you.

Contact Karen Regan at 978-448-2353 or  info@coachforhappiness.com