Sorry it’s taken nearly 2 years to come across your insightful comments here. I happened to end up here because I recently read the book “Human Sigma” which you commented on some time ago.

You are definitely hitting the nail on the head with the idea of where organizational behavior comes from. I’ve found that motivators for behavior are often much more strongly associated to what the boss wants than what the customer wants and needs. This can indeed become a quandry for those of us who are charged with a thing called “customer service”.

The customer experience is very important but as you pointed out, there is no one thing that can make or break it, no matter how you measure it. Worse yet, it seems we want to make customer experience the most important parameter for customer-facing people to be measured against. While this seems like a reasonable approach to most managers, it actually is very counterproductive for several reasons. One of those reasons is that managers will never tell you to achieve high customer experience and ignore everything else. And yet, many items in the “everything else” category are counterproductive to a good customer experience. and believe me, you will hear about it if one of those other key metrics is abysmal even if your customer experience metric is in the stratosphere.

Another problem with the scenario I just painted is the fact that those customer-facing people will be very motivated to find a way to make the numbers look good. That makes them look good. The number of ways this can be done are immense and unless you want to spend 90% of your time as a manager investigating all this, you had better find a better way of motivating your people to do the right thing.

Managers get trapped in this scenario by their managers and by the top executives. They don’t know a way out because they are locked in the same paradigm. I was hoping the book “Human Sigma” would show a way out of that sort of trap. It didn’t,. The only answer I know of is to be very careful about how you motivate and how you measure employees. One false move and you will live to regret it at some point. Unless you want to simply go through life wearing the proverbial rose-colored glasses and keep saying “nothing is wrong.”

Often executive leaders have a hard time shifting the behavior of the organization if deeply entrenched unwritten rules are getting in the way. These unwritten rules typically operate just below the level of conscious awareness… and you can’t address them without clarifying what they are.

I look forward to following your blog Eric.

Love your article!