We take random samples of staff emails, sales proposals, phone calls and meetings (pretending to be a customer or colleague) and retail point-of-sale interactions as appropriate. Using proprietary algorithms, statistical analysis and qualitative judgments, we assign an overall friendliness score to each person, ranging from 1 to 10 (categorized behavioral scores are available for an additional fee). Detailed recommendations can then be made at the individual level or group level and may or may not be anonymous (may enhance trust).
Determine:
- Who to train
- Who to warn
- Who to give a raise or promote so they don’t leave
Measure:
- Improvements in friendliness scores over time (post training, new hires, etc.)
- Data at the group level to identify departmental trends and highlight systemic problems
Why do a friendliness audit?
Selling to new customers is hard and expensive, so why not emphasize keeping and up-selling your current customers? Stop unfriendly staff from alienating customers, which forces you to find new ones all the time.
Unfriendliness creates bad word of mouth and this has accelerated with the rise of social media tools online. Companies pay careful attention to the mood created by their advertising, but often something much more powerful – word of mouth – is neglected. In today’s more connected world, word of mouth about unfriendly treatment can quickly lift or destroy a company’s image. This can make it harder to attract the best employees, partners and customers.
Rudeness in the workplace also decreases job satisfaction. This increases worker turnover (thus escalating costs), decreases productivity (staff work less hard, take more sick days) and results in redirected aggression or unfriendly or unprofessional treatment of customers, thus decreasing sales.
Just think: How many really great employees will never apply to your company because they’ve heard the working environment is negative?
Why not just conduct customer and employee surveys?
Friendliness Audits avoid the biases of amateur mystery shoppers and customer surveys, they get around the non-objectivity of surveys by internal rivals, and they avoid the non-uniform assessments of co-workers who lack common values, methodologies and reporting language. Although not without value, those other programs are very difficult to design properly and often yield distorted results (E.g., poorly screened and trained mystery shoppers skew results, customer surveys have a selection bias and rivals cannot be objective about their co-workers). Instead, you can rely on objective language data that is factually recorded (without any amateur pre-interpretation) and then analyzed by experts at Velvet Talk Management.
Our audits provide easy-to-use, hard data on the friendliness of individuals (independent of product opinion and physical environments) that can be accurately and specifically monitored over time to ensure genuine improvement in your company’s internal and external interactions. Friendliness of employees is thus isolated as a variable and freed from the hard-to-measure caprice of subjectivity or other distortion factors that are inherent in other forms of research.
Adding an external and/or internal Friendliness Audit to your current research efforts can facilitate substantial improvements in how your company is viewed, thereby markedly enhancing its competitiveness.
Why not just perform psychometric questionnaires like Myers-Briggs to assess friendliness?
These tests sometimes provide value and are convenient, especially during hiring; however, these tests have strong response bias. Indeed many if not most people taking these tests are bound to cheat so that they can game the system to get better outcomes. They can frequently divine the intention of each given question so that the final personality score is quite different from their true personality. Furthermore, tests like Myers-Briggs measure theoretical potentiality of communications, based on a questionnaire-based assessment of personality traits (including friendliness), whereas our Friendliness Audits sample actual communications that have already happened and in natural situations (I.e., communications with customers or co-workers)
Often the only way you can take a really good look at yourself is through someone else’s eyes. So let Velvet Systems accurately assess your current friendliness profile and then help you build a stronger business.
