(And if you put your name on it, YOU are ultimately responsible for the results)

This is a follow up to my post last week. To recap, a third-party calling on behalf of my insurance company asked about my employment status, giving me the options of employed, self-employed, or housewife. Not surprisingly, the last option didn’t sit well with me, especially in light of the fact that they had not asked if my husband was anything other than employed or self-employed.

I realized, however, that I missed a key lesson here for business owners. While I was willing to push the blame to the third-party company – I have otherwise had a good experience with my insurance company – that really wasn’t fair. Ultimately, the insurance company holds the responsibility for the actions of the parties that it hires, particularly when these parties are acting on their behalf and interacting with customers.

This is an important lesson for small businesses, who often subcontract out work because they lack the internal resources to handle certain jobs. Whether work is done in-house or subcontracted, when it leaves your control to go out to the customer, it is your responsibility to ensure the job is done right. This includes the obvious tangible quality control, but also the communication that accompanies the job. If you authorize people to speak on your behalf, you need to be certain that the quality and tone of their communications meet or exceed the standards that you have set for yourself.

As a business, one of the things that NimblePros prides itself on is our ability to communicate with clients. But I will let you in on a little secret here – that ability isn’t a perfect one for any of us, and it is a trained and practiced behavior as much as it is a natural talent. We also recognize that there is always room for improvement and we constantly strive to be better.

So how do we do it so successfully so much of the time?

It starts with hiring the right people. I always emphasize during our recruiting periods that we can teach applicants to be better developers, but that the existing communication skills of the applicant need to be excellent. (Our very first hire was a disaster in this regard; I ended up giving him a Strunk and White Elements of Style book about two weeks into the job. He quit shortly thereafter, saving us the pain of firing him.) Applicants with obvious communication problems don’t make it past the initial screening, and our interview process evaluates applicants on their technical and communication skills. To be successful with NimblePros, you must be outstanding in both of these areas.

The next step is putting your confidence in your team and empowering them to communicate with the client. I want each and every one of my developers to have the ability and self-confidence to speak directly with the customer. (This is apparently nearly unheard of in most developer shops – and with good reason in a lot of cases. It seems those companies didn’t emphasize communication in the interview process.) This seems like a simple thing, and it is, but it avoids a lot of miscommunication by limiting the layers through which a message must pass.

The next step is mentoring. We work with our new staff, explaining our expectations and how we want things to be communicated. And we also help them in their initial interactions with clients – we want to be sure that anything going out the door (or outbox) with our name on it is up to our standards.

However, the real magic is the communication and collaboration within our team. Our senior staff is perfectly capable of writing emails and conducting phone calls on their own, and that is certainly the case most of the time. Nevertheless, there are certain key junctures in our relationships with a client that we rely on the collaboration of our team to get it right. It is not uncommon for us to schedule significant phone calls to clients with multiple members of our team. Each one of them has valuable ideas to share, and it ensures that everyone – including the client – is on the same page. And it is not uncommon to hear, “Hey, can you come and look at this email that I am going to send to the client? I want your input.” Even – perhaps especially – the most senior members of our staff realize that a quick review by another member of the team ensures that their message is communicated clearly and professionally to the client.

Regardless of how good you are at what you do, the success of your business depends on the communication skills of your team. Words really are magic.

Tags: Customer Service