I’m posting this one out of the standard “weekly” list because the Service Untitled blog wrote about it yesterday. I read it and was stunned.

First, what is a positive escalation? “Positive escalations are situations in which a customer asks to speak to a manger because of a particularly good experience.”

Great. We have a baseline now.  A customer asked to speak to an employee’s boss because they LIKED the service.  This is awesome!

In the call center where Dougless spoke to the manager, “the manager told the supervisor not to take them, because they weren’t really necessary and the supervisors don’t have much extra time to take unnecessary calls.”

That is where I was completely shocked.  The manager told the supervisor NOT to take them … In writing this, I still can’t comprehend this.

Imagine how the employee feels when he contacts his supervisor and says, “Hey, this customer wants to talk to you about a positive experience.”  The supervisor, in turn, says “I’m sorry. I don’t have time.  Please say thanks and move on to the next call.”  What a phenominal way to deflate the positive energy and motivation that the agent had from being commended by a customer, by having just helped the customer in an extra-ordinary fashion.

That is the perfect way to DE-motivate your employees. If your goal is just that, then keep it up.  Otherwise, change.  Take the time necessary to speak to the customer about the agent that did such a good job.  Find out HOW the agent did so well and WHY the customer felt compelled to speak to the supervisory staff about the issue.  Once you have this information, there are two critical things to do:

1. Recognize the agent’s excellent work in the most effective manner. For some, this is public and for others, it is by pulling them aside. Regardless of how you do it, make sure you do.
2. Identify training opportunities.  The agent did something right — figure out how to bring it across the rest of the team.

The one thing not to do … ever … is to demarginalize the positive.