Charlie,

I agree with your thought that if your motive for increasing trust is to make money you’ll not do as well as the more sincere person who really cares about the relationship, all other parameters being equal. 

However, isn’t it more precise to recognize that the platform upon which one attempts to build this trust is the profit which is the initial cause and ultimate result of the relationship?

I believe that the level of trust in the relationships I forge with my clients has a very material effect on the length as well as the sales growth in those relationships but we all know that the reason I called in the first place was to secure profitable business and that without that the relationship would die.

The retail outfits where I enjoy shopping are those that put that Confidence, Integrity, Pride, and Passion into action. For me, those are Borders, Whole Foods, LL Bean, and Roche Bros. (local Boston grocery chain). Never do the employees act as if it's a drag or inconvenience to deal with me. 

When I think back on the tech companies I've worked in, I realize that it doesn't work if you don't have all four AND the confidence and pride in your products and services are well-founded. I worked in a software company that lived on well after it should have died because we had Confidence, Integrity, Pride, and Passion - but it was mostly around our ability to survive in the face of the market reality that our technology (which originally well-wrought and still useful) was outmoded, and we had no financial ability to give it the complete overhaul it needed. We worked overtime to make product tweaks and to do whatever we needed to do to support our customers. But in the end, the ugly reality caught up with us and we got acquired and subsumed.

As usual, your post got me thinking!

I certainly nod my head at the companies Maureen selects.  And I also recognize that what Eric says is depressingly common.  It is a source of continued amazement to me that the admiration of LL Bean et al is so widespread, yet the practices Eric talks about are so prevalent.

Phil McGee, it seems to me, is absolutely correct in adding precision.   Business is not charity, a corporate entity is not an
eleemosynary institution.  I certainly don't recommend pulling the plug on a conversation the moment you think the probability of sale crossed a line, but  it's also true that  we don't do what we do just to be nice. 

Maybe the way to put it is  that we're all in business  for several reasons,  profit being a big one, but that things—including profit—go very much better when we let it be a byproduct as well as a goal, when we manage it in longer timeframes than we measure it, and when we operate from integrity.

I'm a bit of a cynic, but I do believe that  bit about doing well by doing good.  Business done with the customer in mind is better business.  And no harm in saying it's all business.

Phil?

I think too many companies do not follow the common sense advice of, "Make profit an outcome, not a goal." Many companies are so focused on short-term profit that they lose sight of what it actually takes to earn one.  It's rare to see a company with a long-term customer strategy, but those that have it end up with engaged customers and profits to boot. It doesn't have to be one or the other. 

money/profit vs. me/customer...

why in our culture  does it seem to be an "either/or"propositon rather than a "both/and" proposition...

what's the deeper thinking (underneath "dollars" and/or underneath "people/relationship") that brings one to support one proposition or the other...

Rob,

Thank you for your very thoughtful and well-articulated comments; I do appreciate your taking the time to contribute here.

Let me say I may come to regret the phrase "perverse in so many ways." You're the second to comment on it. If I get one more, I'll go back and edit it out, and say why I've done so in a comment. I do not want to be the source of what is perceived as an ad hominem attack on Gallup.

I very much share your admiration for Gallup; they are generally excellent in so many ways that it struck me as perverse that they would deviate, as I saw it, in this case. In fact, I said in the post, "the advice that Gallup then serves up is excellent." Later in the post I said "they give excellent advice about how to do it. Well done." So let me underscore again—Gallup does great work. I find this piece an anomaly, not a pattern.

Let me respond to your comments.

You, I and Gallup seem to be in agreement that the article is about what should be done between measurements. Gallup puts it this way: "what happens between [customer survey] measurements?" You put it: "how to maintain desired behavior patterns and focus for their CSRs in between those measurement periods." I suggested they were positioning engagement as something you focus on to bridge the times between measurements.

Still sounds like "fallback" to me. The implication is, asI read it, if you could measure all interactions all the time, that would be the ideal. I'm trying to suggest that that belief can—and often does—lead to bad customer interactions.

Regarding profit as an outcome, I too have annual goals for revenue, profit and clients. In no way am I arguing against that. In fact, I'm not even arguing against short-term measurements. I'm arguing against the endemic belief that the best way to affect short-term metrics is short-term management. I'm trying to argue that the best short-term performance comes from long-term management, not short-term. The measures themselves are not harmful per se, they're not the issue.

I agree with you completely about the fascinating continuum between full truth-telling and total lying. We all inhabit various parts of that spectrum at different times. I agree with you about things being situational, and in fact I never said anything about anyone being "inherently" a con man; as you said, we are all indeed capable of it. No argument.

(I suggest anyone interested in this read Sissela Bok's excellent book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. To unjustly distill it down, you cannot make the case for a complete prohibition against lying; but you can almost always tell more truth than we are inclined to do. The world does not suffer from too little lying, but from too much.

Regarding my "perversity number three," you say the author didn't at all mean what I said, namely arguing for extrinsic motivators over intrinsic ones. You are right, he did not literally say that rewards ought to be specifically linked to measurements. Though I'd be surprised if he didn't meant that.

I'm sure that, as you suggest, Gallup does recommend hiring people who are innately inclined toward customer engagement. But as I pointed out in my wraparound example: the convenience store chain I consulted to also tried very hard to hire honest people. They actually defined their problem as one of finding better hiring criteria to find more honest people.

But that was not their problem. The problem was that their frequent measurement systems actually drove honest people to theft. If that doesn't deserve the name perversity, I don't know what does.

I think the real difference between us is this. Both you (at least in this comment) and Gallup (in this one article as I read it) seem to believe that measurement improves performance. This is the Hawthorne effect, first observed in the 19th century. It is still evident today, in sweeps weeks on TV, and in call centers. You can easily find a lot of examples where people behave better because they're being watched. As you put it, "People tend to change their behavior patterns temporarily when they’re being measured or feel eyes are on them."

Clearly you believe their performance improves, not declines, by being measured. And the clear import of the Gallup article is the same thing. Further, the article seems to suggest the more the better. If some data improves performance, then more data will improve it even more. Because we don't have enough customer data often enough, we have to rely on fallback methods like the ones they describe—the sort of coaching that I actually think is far superior to frequent discussions about short-term data.

I would argue that that leads to short-term-ism. You can take the most internally motivated people in the world and if you give them monthly or weeklyor daily metrics, if you subject them constantly to discussions about short term metrics—and tie in rewards to boot—you will produce rats pecking the bar to get food, who have lost touch with the underlying reason you put the metrics in place in the first place. The measures become the goal. You get short term behavior.

Short term behavior is very desirable in certain businesses—for example, retail stores have extremely detailed weekly and daily data, because when it rains, you want umbrellas on hand to sell. For example, the airlines need detailed statistics to peform load management and pricing. In those businesses, short-term metrics are there for a good business reason—you need short term management.

But for most businesses, when you put your customer relationships in the hands of people who are constantly subjected to that kind of short term information, the temptation is almost always to default to short term behavior. Link that short-term behavior to money, and you get perversity.

(An example from Alfie Kohn's book: a study observed children playing games. The researcher then offered the kids rewards for playing their favorite game. The result was they lost interest in playing the game. Click. Perversion.)

The best short-term results do not come from short-term management. They come from long-term management. Data can help, but it is not the answer. Focus on short term data without long-term context breeds perversion. Using lots of short term data to have long term discussions is great.

I'm not an expert on CSRs and call centers, though I do know something about managing professionals, so here's a generalization. Consulting irms that focus on weekly utilization have worse customer satisfaction ratings than those that focus on it monthly. And consulting firms with healthy customer satisfaction ratings are more profitable. The focus on short-term metrics actually causes short-term performance to fail.

People who focus on the quality of the customer relationship for the sake of the relationship have higher customer sat ratings that those who focus on the customer sat ratings for the sake of the ratings. After a certain level of saturation, the Heisenberg Principle overwhelms the Hawthorne effect. People who are measured all the time will go passive aggressive on you, resisting in subtle ways and taking it out on the customer. Check the comments above this one from Ian Welsh, Liz Glaskowski and Eric Brown who I think speak to that effect.

I'm rambling. Thanks again Rob for a thoughtful post and please feel free to come back at this one.