Nice People

As I ponder some of the staff who I inherited from the former manager, now happily lounging in Cancum, I remember an article I read years ago. It was about hiring a specialist trying to revive a company's sagging customer service. The specialist didn't recommend more training, better ads, improved accomodations, or any of the frills that customer orientated companies try to use to lure in each other's customers. Instead, he recommended simply taking the employees to lunch at a quality sit down resturant. The waiter was a part of the process of determining which employees to keep, the role being slow and clumsy.

Those employees who identifed with or showed sympathy to the struggling waiter, the specialist recommended keeping. Those employees who were short with the waiter, the specialist recommended either reassigning or firing. The final analysis was simple. Rather than the expensive props being wasted by bad customer service, the company should focus on hiring nice people. A good way to determine nice people was to observe how they treated a waiter struggling with the orders.

Seemed like a simple idea, but one I wish one or more of the poeple who held my position before me had tried. As I review applications for a new opening, I wish they would identify the applicant as being nice or otherwise. One can always learn systems, or programs, or accounting. Can one learn to be nice? I wonder.