Customer reception: handing over without diluting responsibility
At reception, a request can circulate between departments without anyone knowing who should contact the customer again. The management question is specific: how can handovers be organised so that forwarding a request does not become abandonment without accountability?
What the literature establishes
John M. Darley and Bibb Latané (1968, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) demonstrated experimentally that, during a simulated emergency, believing that other witnesses are present can reduce the likelihood of intervention and delay it. Their work supports a mechanism of diffusion of responsibility: the presumed presence of others does not guarantee that anyone will act. It does not, however, examine customer reception or interdepartmental handovers.
Role ambiguity, beyond the number of people involved
John R. Rizzo, Robert J. House and Sidney I. Lirtzman (1970, Administrative Science Quarterly) proposed measures of role conflict and ambiguity and examined their relationships with organisational variables, including job satisfaction. Their findings associate role ambiguity with lower satisfaction, among other results, without establishing causality. For reception teams, this suggests a useful distinction: knowing which department has the relevant expertise is not the same as knowing who remains responsible for follow-up.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every request should be assigned to a single person until it is resolved. These studies do not demonstrate the superiority of that arrangement, which may also deprive customers of necessary expertise. The hypothesis worth testing is narrower: making responsibility explicit during handovers might reduce requests left without follow-up, without eliminating collaboration. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the data and tools cannot establish
An experiment involving an emergency and a study of organisational roles do not measure the effect of a handover protocol on customer satisfaction. Similarly, a sent message or a transferred case records an action, not acceptance of responsibility. Counting handovers as completed requests therefore risks concealing precisely the problem under examination.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within SHR's « Accueil client » programme, an exercise applicable in Lausanne is to examine handovers between reception staff and specialists in a medtech company, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation or a scale-up in the Lake Geneva region. For two weeks, record for every transferred request, without storing its sensitive content, whether a recipient explicitly accepted responsibility for follow-up before reception closed its own involvement. The indicator is the proportion of these confirmed handovers among all transferred requests; requests returning to reception because no response was received are counted separately. Comparing these measures over an equally long period after responsibilities have been clarified provides a local operational check, not causal proof of the training's effectiveness. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Lausanne
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