In Zayo Group’s 2008 Accomplishment and 2009 Goals, I listed as Zayo’s #2 2009 Priority as:
Become, in the eyes of Zayo Group employees, one of the best places to work in the telecom industry.
About four years ago, I learned an important lesson in a round table meeting with ICG employees: employees see a direct relationship between customer service and employee work satisfaction. “When customers are not happy,” it was explained to me, “work is not fun, no matter how much money is being made.”
It was enlightening at the time; once explained, the point was obvious. Dealing with irate customers is not fun. Pride is important for work satisfaction–when you know the service you are providing is shoddy, you cannot be proud of your work or your company. Poor service causes unpredictable work hours, tense work circumstances, and unpleasant conversations with co-workers.
So in Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs (as it applies to work satisfaction), providing great service to customers is 
near the foundation of the hierarchy. If you don’t do this, nothing else matters all that much. Just as Maslow’s Hierarchy doesn’t stop at food, water, and safety, great service alone does not translate into a “best place to work”. I will talk about others in subsequent posts, but I want this one to focus on service to 
customers.
Zayo provides essential telecom services to its customers. A majority of the revenue is with large carriers and service providers. Our success financially and our aspiration to be a “best place to work” is predictated on our ability to deliver great service. Our service activation process must be dependable. And our network must be reliable. We will use 2009 to deepen our relationships with our customers and strengthen our reputation as a reliable and responsive provider of telecom services. This is a foundational step toward making Zayo a “Best Place to Work”.
Leave a response (2 so far)
Subscribe via RSS
I cannot agree more with this concept. Often we hear that in a business like Internet access, cost is the primary decision driver for customers. But if you are not providing an excellent customer experience, in my opinion, it doesn’t matter how ‘cheap’ you are selling the services. Customers want a relationship with their carrier that they can trust. This can be especially true with lower speed enterprise customers that often feel neglected by larger carriers. Metrics don’t matter if your services fail too often, are not fixed fast enough and when there are repair delays, you don’t keep customers updated with status. This then drives down to employee morale.
Dan,
Great post. While customers being happy does not guarantee employee happiness, unhappy customers pretty much guarantees an unhappy workplace as customers will share their dissatisfaction and it’s fairly hard to stay upbeat when your getting an unpleasant earful from a customer.
I would add also that customers can be very understanding when things aren’t working right as long as they are handled correctly. Basically, they understand that things break. If you at least don’t have it breaking terribly too often and you handle the situations right when it does break, they will feel cared for and still feel good about their relationship with you.
Excellent customer service can be broken down to four areas. (1) Knowing the customer. That is you know who they are and don’t make them repeat that with any hand-offs/etc. Understand what their needs are (how they use your service) and listen to their issues. (2) Helping them. Isolate their issues and resolve them quickly. Fix it right the first time and don’t have them calling back for the same thing repeatedly. (3) Communicate a lot. Inform them of status updates. Ask for feedback on the resolutions and check back (that’s always a pleasant surprise to get the occasional follow up call). and (4) Appreciate them. Answer their calls in a timely fashion (nothing says I don’t care like making them wait in a long queue) and share your findings and resolutions so they feel treated like a valued customer (appreciated).
If you can get the customers to where they view you in a much more positive light, then you will find it significantly easier to keep morale higher at work.
- Chris