This question arose from a meeting today. The small and successful business is looking to replace a Customer Service person, after many years of excellent employment.
But how do you find someone who knows what questions to ask to be able to do the right thing for the Client?
The standard skills are fairly easy to specify: good with Microsoft or Google products, good telephone manner and accurate data collection and so on.
Obviously, the small business owner with 5, 10, 20 years’ experience has a lot of experience!
- They have seen it all
- They know what is important to know
- They know what doesn’t work
- They know what they need to know to service the client
- They know because they are an expert, so that knowledge is common-sense right?
Wrong. That expert knowledge is not common sense.
When you hire someone that needs your expertise to make decisions about servicing your client, they need access to that expert knowledge.
So, you now have another job role yourself.
You have to transfer your expert knowledge, either through an expert system, a database, AI or some such, or, you have to train your new employee in your relevant expert knowledge.
Either way you’ll have to document it in some fashion.
Whenever you hire someone there is always the need to train the person in ‘the way we do things around here’.
Make sure the person is allowed to grow their own expertise too. You want them to improve on your ‘common sense’ don’t you?