Firing David Lightman: Page 2 of 7

I understand that my experience with may not be directly applicable to the situation in your column, in that the problem at seems to be systemic rather than limited to just one employee. However, my point is that lost my business after a relatively small number of negative contacts with their technical support help desk, and I don???t believe I am alone in my willingness to rather quickly abandon a business relationship based poor technical support.

No other client-contact department has a more critical impact on a company???s client retention rate than the technical support desk, and while protecting your employees is a commendable policy you have to be very quick to act on negative performance in order to protect your business. This is even more critical if your help desk people serve internal clients as well as external. Incorrect information or lack of interest from your help desk to internal clients will inevitably make those departments appear weaker to their external clients, thus affecting the perception of your company as a whole.

There is also the larger issue of the steady decline we have been seeing in the quality of customer service in general over the last 30 years in our society. While that decline has several complex sociological causes, a large part of it is due to an overall relaxation of expectations and quality standards on the part of companies that employee people in customer service roles.

My company???s experience has been that if we state clearly our expectations, and maintain very short corrective processes for those that don???t meet those standards, customer service quality and employee morale both remain high. We weed out the problem children before they can become chronic, and that boosts the morale of the employees that are performing well. Nobody likes to carry dead weight, and believe me, coworkers always know who is the dead weight in their area. I???m not advocating immediately firing someone who makes a mistake, but I am advocating requiring immediate and lasting improvement. We have found that lengthy corrective plans simply don???t work as well as short ones, and we have had at least as many employee turnarounds as we have had terminations for poor performance while adhering to this policy.