Our customer service team recently opened a satellite office. A portion of our team is now 300 miles away from our company headquarters. No, it’s now outsourcing, it’s really just business redundancy and continuity. Having a team working at the same time, from a different location is peace of mind for a stormy day.

The problem is that home based customer service agents and agents in satellite offices even are much trickier to motivate and to help maintain high morale. It’s also a challenge to help these customer service professionals connect with the rest of the company and develop a consistent customer experience.

Here are my 2 cents on motivating customer service team members who may have alternate work arrangements or who may work from a different office than your regular staff. These suggestions help keep people connected with you and your customer experience mission.

The reasoning behind giving little unexpected extras

I was in Montreal this week at the #140MTL conference. It was a tremendous event organized by Mila Araujo. In addition to speaking about “What’s Your Purple Goldfish?”, I had a chance to watch some great presentations from the likes of Mitch Joel, Sam Fiorella, Ric Dragon, Susan Borst, Ted Curtin, Judi Samuels, Renee Martinez, JC Little and Josepf Haslam.  I always walk away from conferences inspired. Josepf used an amusing venn diagram that poked fun at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. It sparked my thinking about the reasoning for giving little unexpected extras and the benefits of going the extra mile?

Here is a venn diagram showing how marketing lagniappe can affect strategy, culture and reputation:

Sometimes reward and recognition programs take a hit in a downturn economy. We make the assumption that movie tickets or other chachkies are the only viable options for rewarding our employees.

Here are 5 employee reward and recognition ideas that are budget friendly!

1. Serve in the Community – What better way to promote a service driven culture than to allow your employees to serve in the community and represent your organization. Your organization may already have existing relationships with charities in your area. Allowing an employee to build a house with Habitat for Humanity, or serve in a hospital or food pantry organization, are amazing ways to recognize an employee while supporting your local communities.

2. Cross Training – Allowing an employee to learn a new skill while meeting new coworkers in other departments, is a great reward and recognition option. This career development  idea is not only easy on the budget, but also helps improve employee morale – preventing burnout or potential turnover.

3. Solve a Problem – Employees that are due recognition are typically great employees. They are talented and have a drive that can’t be overlooked. A great way to reward a great employee, is allowing them to solve a problem. Look at your to “do list” for ideas, or maybe the departmental goals for the quarter. Move something off of your plate by turning into a reward for one of your employees.

Regardless of who you’re leading, you have people reporting to you that should perform better.  A sales team, technology professionals, the operations teams — sometimes you just need a little bit more from those involved.

A lot of books on leadership will tell you that under-performers should be fired.  Jack Welch, the highly successful CEO of General Electric for 20 years made it a religion to fire anyone rated in the bottom of the company.  Year after year, thousands of employees were cut loose to make room for “high performers”.  Out with the bad.  And in with the better.

And while that sounds sexy. It is often not the right move.  Especially in today’s fast-moving economic churn.

The fire-and-hire cycle just leads to even worse results.

Frankly, the executive you think you should fire was probably performing like an all-star when you hired him.  Given your skill at knowing what your company needs, you hand-picked that person.  For their talents, their charisma, and a work ethic. They were the right fit.

And they probably still are the right fit for you now.

Life just got in the way.  That’s what happens.  Life happens.  Busy executives have personal lives that get confused and chaotic.  Sometimes, for no fault of their own, life deals them a unfair hand.

As a Chief Customer Officer (or Customer Experience Officer), success is achieved when you have the ability to evolve your company from delivering a “defaulted” experience that results from each silo doing their own planning, prioritization, projects to uniting the organization to deliver a reliable and then ultimately differentiated and desired experience.

A successful Chief Customer Officer can:

• Bring folks together who don’t normally work together
• Establish clarity out of the complexity that surrounds who does what on projects for “customers”
• Break the work into manageable chunks so that it doesn’t get abandoned
• Develop “ownership” of the work by the operating areas
• Consider their success as enabling the operating areas to focus and change

Here are the ten aptitudes and competencies of people who are the most successful with this mission – those with the ability to work across a business operation; engaging leaders and operational leaders in uniting their efforts in behalf of customer profitability.

With a background in a software industry that tends to focus more heavily on VOC than on VOE, I have been searching lately for tools that help companies make it their mission to focus on the employee first.

Note that this focus on VOC has not necessarily been a reflection of the vendors. I can speak for myself (as head of their Services departments) that my teams and I talked to clients about the importance of listening to employees and focusing on the employee experience; however, I felt like most companies didn't get it. (Many still don't.) The stance was often, "We'll listen to and focus on employees next/later; customers first." Wrong.

If you follow my blog regularly, you've probably noticed that I have written several posts about employee engagement and employee experience lately. I can't convey enough how important those concepts are to the success of your business.

Well, put all that together, and a few months ago I stumbled upon a company that I felt had a solid tool for amping up a culture transformation and putting the focus on employee experience, engagement, and appreciation. And then, lo and behold, just recently, I had the pleasure of meeting (virtually) the company's co-founder and CEO after he read and commented on my post, Employee Engagement is Not a Mandate.

Enabling employees to succeed in a fast-changing business environment should be central to every organization’s strategy.  After all, when employees are properly equipped with the right set of skills, they’re best positioned to add maximum value to both the organization and its customer base.  Are education, training, and lifelong learning for your workforce important to your company?  Or do I really need to ask if your workforce is truly motivated and engaged as learners?

This past week I had the wonderful opportunity of working with PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors). They support their customers (members) who run dive centers and resorts around the world. I presented a customer service speech at their headquarters in Southern California. As I toured their offices I noticed several things. Their walls were painted blue, like the ocean. There were dozens and dozens of large pictures of their members SCUBA diving. They have a pool for their employees to learn and practice diving, or to just relax in during lunch or after work. A nice locker room allows their employees to work out and ride bikes during lunch, so they can shower and return to work clean and refreshed. Surprisingly, this is exactly what I expected to see when I visited their building.

Peter McMillan and Chuck Pass own Pedro’s Planet, an office supply company that specializes in environmentally conscious office products. They are big into recycling for their customers. Even their office furniture reflects their culture. The desks are made out of recycled materials. Wouldn’t expect anything less from a company whose favorite holiday is Earth Day, the annual celebration that reminds us to be “green.”

You were probably taught, as we were, that all naturally occurring phenomena are distributed along a “normal” or Bell curve.  Take talent, for example.   In this case, very  untalented people would make up a small percentage of a population (say, the people in your company), people more-or-less average talent-wise would make up most of them, and only a few would be extremely talented.

This may be all wrong.

A new study (full study here, description here) shows that talent in any most organizations is instead distributed along a Power Law or Paretian curve.  That is: most people are not very talented, far fewer are of average talent, and a very few are extraordinarily talented and carry the ball for everyone else.

As you can imagine, this study has generated quite a bit of controversy, and the jury is certainly still out.  But I can say that in every organization I’ve ever been involved in – start-ups, small companies, large multinationals, non-profits, and local interest groups – that it truly was a few talented people who  delivered most of the results.