Undercover Boss highlights the need for passionate people

It's no secret that I really like the new CBS show, Undercover Boss. I'm mildly disappointed that it's been a few weeks since they featured any cringe-worthy moments, but there are still plenty of great lessons to be learned.

The latest episode featured Joel Manby, President and CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment. His experience highlighted the importance of having passionate employees who truly care about the business, the people they work with, and they people they serve.

Watch the episode first if you don't want me to spoil the plot.

Hiring Passionate People

A lot of companies seem to have their recruiting priorities backwards. The first thing they look for is relevant experience. "Have you worked in similar, soul-crushing jobs before? Great! You can be mediocre here too."

Some companies dig deeper and look for relevant skills. "Yes, I see you have a long history of customer service jobs. However, at our company we like our customer service reps to be friendly. Have any of your customer service positions required you to be friendly and courteous when dealing with customers?" At first this sounds ridiculous, but we all know there are plenty of service jobs out that where just a little courtesy could vault you to 'employee of the month' status. 

Very few companies hire for passion. The five employees Joel Manby followed at Herschend Family Entertainment all seemed to love what they did. Yes, some of them faced their fair share of challenges, but they loved serving people and they loved the business. Here's my suggested priority order for recruiting:

1. Passion. Find peole who will love your company and love their jobs.
2. Skill. Find people who have the skills to do their jobs well.
3. Experience. Experience is only good if you use it wisely. You could have 20 years of experience doing something, but that might just mean you've been doing it poorly for 20 years.

We use a very simply model to help visualize what you truly need in any employee. Check it out here.

Social media strategies: Sell and Tell

This post highlights the second of four social media strategies I uncovered in my experiment to learn how companies use this medium to engage their customers. I highlighted the first strategy, the Placeholder, yesterday. Today's strategy is called "Sell and Tell". All the strategies are a function of how much 'social' and how much 'media' is used.

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Social media strategies: the Placeholder

All ideas are subject to revision when better ones come along, right? Last week, I discussed three social media strategies I had observed companies using when trying to engage their customers. This week, I offer a small modification that yields four strategies along with a description of the first one: the 'Placeholder'. Tomorrow, I'll discuss the "Sell and Tell" and next week I'll discuss the last two and reveal all the companies in my experiment.

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Undercover Boss explores the dark underworld of fulfillment

This week's episode of Undercover Boss gives us a behind the scenes look at a call center and fulfillment operation when they follow Michael Rubin, CEO of GSI Commerce. GSI Commerce provides outsourced sales and fulfillment services for companies like the NFL. If you order a jersey from NFL.com, it's actually GSI Commerce that takes your order and ships the merchandise to you. Most of us have ordered something online, via a catalog, or through a 1-800 number, but few of us have given much thought about what it takes to get the order to you.

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State your purpose when using social media

The most basic definition of customer service is how well you meet your customer’s expectations.  If you meet their expectations, that's good. If you fall short of their expectations, that's bad. If you exceed their expectations, that's great.

Telling your customers up front what they can expect from you is a great way to avoid disappointments and misunderstandings.  That’s why I can’t figure out why so few companies in my social media experiment are clear about why they are using Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook was a total strikeout.  Nobody in my experiment explicitly states “here’s what you can expect from us on Facebook”.  Best Buy comes the closest with a set of ‘House Rules’ that you have to scroll down the page to find:

    

Twitter is a little better.  Here you can see the difference between Best Buy (clear purpose) and Starbucks (some guy named “Brad”):

   

As always, your comments and suggestions are very much appreciated!