The Effortless Experience by Matthew Dixon

Author:Matthew Dixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Personality-Based Issue Resolution

What if, instead of constantly striving for absolute consistency in the way live customer interactions are handled, a rep could create a more customized approach to service? What if there was a way to identify the basic personality characteristics of each customer live and in the moment, and tailor the interaction to that one customer? That skill would undoubtedly create a superior service experience and lower the effort required to resolve issues. But is it possible?

Surely, within every major service organization, there are some individuals who seem to have a more finely tuned mechanism for being able to get on the same wavelength with the customers they deal with. Some people just “click” better with people who are having a problem or issue. They seem to be able to understand the other person—what they need, where they’re coming from—and provide the kind of interaction that feels right at a visceral level.

Sometimes that ability is chalked up as superior empathy skills, and sometimes it appears as an almost maternal interest in helping others, but whatever it is, it works for those select few who seem to possess it. Being on the same page as the customer goes a long way toward reducing customer effort and mitigating disloyalty.

But here’s the frustrating thing—if you ask these very special service reps how they do what they do, their most likely response is, “Do what?” That’s because, for these top performers, this behavior is just intuitive. If organizations could find more people with this skill, they would probably want to hire them. But these skills are very hard to see on a résumé, or test for in an interview. That’s why the idea of a teachable, scalable approach to personality-based issue resolution is so necessary. It is, in essence, a way to enable even the least attuned service reps to emulate the kinds of behaviors—and results—that otherwise would be restricted to the few who have these special people skills.

While there have been a number of methodologies and systems for identifying personality types, the best we’ve ever seen was originally developed by the UK financial services company Bradford & Bingley. The concept they used is rooted in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment. Many of us are familiar with this basic construct, which analyzes a person’s dominant preferences in perception and thinking style. The Myers-Briggs test assesses each person based on four “dichotomies” and then creates a four-letter code to distinguish that individual’s personality. With four different dimensions in play, the Myers-Briggs framework is expressed as a four-by-four grid with sixteen unique characterizations.

Compared to the myriad personality styles we have all encountered in the course of our lives, condensing down to just sixteen seems like a very small number to identify and understand. But in the span of a two- or three-minute customer conversation, having to juggle sixteen different profiles would be overwhelming for most frontline reps. So working with PowerTrain (a UK-based behavioral change consultancy), Bradford & Bingley used their framework, which tightens this up to just four—a far more manageable number for the average rep to navigate (see figure 4.

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