Hey, Middle Managers! Do you know how vital you are to your organization? Your talents and expertise are essential to positive growth in revenue, service, workplace culture and employee experience.
Don’t believe me? I don’t blame you.
The name “middle manager” doesn’t necessarily radiate confidence or define a person who is hardworking. You’re not alone in feeling that way either. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) states that even the name “evokes mediocrity.”
In the same article, though, the HBR agrees that middle managers are incredibly important – central to influence, relationship, and impact in an organization.
I dare say one of the most important positions in your business.
Yet, in my experience, middle managers manage up and down in an organization. Their duties include everything from creating reports, attending meetings and managing projects. They barely have time to manage their teams. Middle management leaders and their teams’ relationships easily turn into just emails, Slack notifications or quick connections between meetings. Or worse yet, the relationship turns into just giving corrections or addressing mistakes. Who wants to be in a relationship like that?
Ok, middle managers – does this sound familiar?
Here’s what you need to know: It’s important to ensure your team has what they need to succeed. And also the necessary support to provide exceptional service to the customer.
So, how do you develop a strong and successful customer team? Here is what I’ve found in my career. Excellent customer service and outreach teams have these essential elements:
9 Traits Of An Excellent Customer Team
More of a visual learner? Here’s a fun graphic just for you:
- Clarity of goals and expectations. Determine how to measure your team’s efforts. Do they know where they stand?
- Regular quality and service feedback. Closely related but very important. Don’t leave input to just the mistakes or just the formal review periods. People want to know how they’re doing before the scorecard is distributed.
- Access to consistent and accurate information. When we dissected the customer and employee satisfaction data, they wanted the same thing…consistent and accurate information. If you don’t have a single source of truth for your staff, you need one.
- Ability to be authentic and express their personality. Our teams are not robots. Provide guidance or process flow, but don’t make them read a script. People want to bring who they are to work and be able to help others in a way that feels good. And let’s be honest – no one wants a script read to them. Leave that for the voicemail dialers.
- Autonomy to help customers. If they are in customer service or outreach, they want to help people. Let them. Don’t create systems and processes and approvals so complicated that they can’t help. Give your people the power to help – it’s what they want!
- Honest and supportive managers. This should need no explanation, but if you expect your teams to deliver exceptional support, be honest as a company and honest to your staff. Support them and care about them. See them. Check in on them. Be human.
- Ability to help improve processes and the safety of sharing ideas. They are doing the work. Trust me, they will have the best ideas on how to improve it or make it better. Listen to them. Set up structures for feedback and create a culture of safety to innovate.
- Respect for their talent and contribution. Closely related but vital. Every single member of our teams is valuable. Period. Honor their work, their talents, their contributions and they will take good care of the customers. But be authentic about it!
- Opportunity to grow. Make sure your organizational structure (especially in call centers, I see this) is built in a way where there is opportunity for those who want to grow or advance. And talk about it – tell about the opportunities. But, if your org chart is too flat, people will bounce.
Knowing these traits, middle managers can successfully build exceptional customer teams.
Customer service, marketing, outreach, call centers, and nonprofit development and fundraising staff…those are tough jobs. And often, those teams get the harsh end of the stick when the customer is unhappy. But your team just needs a little structure, a little encouragement, a little autonomy and the ability to make it better for the customer. It’s truly a key to the best service teams and the best customer and employee satisfaction scores.
