This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
When you hire frontline employees, you are entrusting them with the critical task of generating loyalty and enthusiasm among customers.
That means you don’t want employees who only do what they’re told. You want employees who bring their own energy, enthusiasm, and creativity to serving your customers.
The fact is, you can’t impose a customer-centric organization from the top down by using conventional management techniques. It is always a bottom-up process: Employees need to experience firsthand the satisfaction of earning customers’ gratitude and loyalty. And then they need the freedom to learn from those experiences and experiment with ways that strengthen the connection between the work they do and its impact on customers.
The management team can help build an environment that provides customer feedback and the freedom (within a framework) to respond to it, but it’s up to employees to really make it work.
So how do you hire the right people? First, let’s face it: Not everyone is cut out for that kind of job. We’ve all probably met employees who prefer a traditional work environment, with clear rules and someone telling them what to do. Those aren’t the folks you want in customer-facing roles. Rather, you want people who love to try things out and learn what works—and who want to do a great job for customers.
When American Express decided to revamp its call centers to make them more customer centric, it studied which individuals were most successful in the new environment. It quickly learned that long-term success didn’t derive primarily from an employee’s “hard” call-center skills. Instead, success depended much more on an employee’s personality and “soft” skills, such as the ability to listen. To find people who would thrive in the new environment, American Express explicitly began looking for new hires with experience in retail stores and the hospitality industry rather than in call centers.
As with American Express, JetBlue found that it needed a certain type of individual. “We look for people who are intrinsically motivated,” says Bonny Simi, JetBlue’s vice president of talent, in a recent podcast interview with my colleague Rob Markey. “They're coming to work for more than a paycheck.” As she notes, airline workers are a widely dispersed and remote workforce, and supervisors are not standing by to make sure employees are being friendly. “[They’re] doing it because [they’re] the kind of people who get up on the right side of the bed every morning.”
JetBlue also sees the hospitality industry as a model and is rolling out a new employee training program that takes cues from that industry. But, Simi says she used to laugh when she was asked by executives of other companies if they could observe JetBlue’s customer service training—because until recently, the company didn’t have a training program. “I can’t overemphasize enough how important it is to hire for the right attitude,” she says, “and then you can train the skills.”