Why empower employees if you can get away with it

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Why empower employees if you can get away with it: a different (flawed?) customer strategy

Every Customer consultant says EMPOWER Thy Employee! This is the path to Customer success.

But truly companies find it is better not to empower employees, in fact to hire the dumbest possible employees who will (and cannot) deviate from what the company wants to do.

Take my case. I was to fly from Delhi to Thiruvananthapuram to give a key note address. Jet airways had a flight at 8 am connecting toa 10.35am flight from Mumbai with 30 minutes connecting time. Jet called me and said the arrival into Mumbai was changed to 10.10am and so there was not enough connection time there. They could put me on a 7am flight. No, they could not put me on some other airline. No, they could not do this or that. They could not assign seats, they could notupgrade me. In short, all they were willing to do was to put me on the 7am flight, and the employee was not empowered to help me in any other way.

I computed my options. My choices were to cancel the flight and get another much more expensive flight, or stick to Jet on the earlier flight or take a much later flight and arrive 6 hours later

The person was not empowered to do anything extra for me except aggravate me. But his politeness prevented this though he hinted it was not the airlines fault (so it must be mine, I thought.)

An empowered employee would have given away much more to me.

So why empower employees?

Your comments are welcome!

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Gautam Mahajan
Gautam Mahajan, President of Customer Value Foundation is the leading global leader in Customer Value Management. Mr Mahajan worked for a Fortune 50 company in the USA for 17 years and had hand-on experience in consulting, training of leaders, professionals, managers and CEOs from numerous MNCs and local conglomerates like Tata, Birla and Godrej groups. He is also the author of widely acclaimed books "Customer Value Investment: Formula for Sustained Business Success" and "Total Customer Value Management: Transforming Business Thinking." He is Founder Editor of the Journal of Creating Value (jcv.sagepub.com) and runs the global conference on Creating Value (https://goo.gl/4f56PX).

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