Develop from within
To help promote a customer-focused mentality throughout your organization, you need people within your ranks who can help promote the cause. You need people who value customer service and are willing to do whatever is needed to keep the feedback pipeline between your customers and your management hooked up and flowing.
You can find a lot of answers in the recruiting and interviewing process if you know the right questions to ask. At Comcast, Stemper and his leadership team often have to sift through many resumes and rounds of interviews to find the right match.
“Clearly, we want people who come from a background that values customer service and who can focus on the idea that you deliver what you promise, you make good on your promises and that a handshake is as good as your word,” Stemper says. “The question is, do they already have that in their professional DNA?
Or, if they’re right out of college, can that DNA be formed?”
When a management-level job candidate comes to Stemper and his staff for an interview, they try to gain an extensive knowledge of the person’s background. You can find a lot of that through checking references, but you can sometimes find interesting answers if you pose situational questions during the interview.
“We try to really draw out of them situations they’ve been in,” Stemper says. “Have you ever dealt with an irate customer? Were you ever in a situation where something you told a customer you could deliver turned out to be a challenge through no fault of your own? How did you handle that?”
Maintaining the discipline to find the right person for the job, not just a warm body to fill the position, is one of the most difficult challenges a leader can face. You need to have a plan in place that will allow you to wait out a gap on your team. It can save you a lot of backtracking — and maybe even prevent damage to your culture — later on.
“It’s something you don’t rush, whether it be in hiring entry-level personnel or senior personnel,” Stemper says. “You want to make the right hire, not just make a hire to make a hire, and you need a plan to wait that out. Sometimes that’s easy to do, and sometimes that is painfully hard to do. But when you’ve experienced a hire in which you didn’t wait for the right person, it makes you become a lot more clever in the ways you prepare to wait for the right person.”
