Customer Service

customer service: if you want a 10, do 10 work

You want your employees to do well, right? Of course, and you know that you can’t manage what you can’t measure so you set up some way of measuring their performance. And then you discover that you truly get what you measure, regardless of whether that’s what you actually wanted or not.

A salesperson recently revealed the disconnect between measured and desired outcomes when a co-worker purchased a car a couple of weeks ago. The salesperson’s parent company has a big focus on customer service and providing an outstanding experience. Each customer is surveyed after the sale and any rating lower than a 10 (the highest possible) drew negative attention for both the sales person and the dealer.

On the surface this sounds great. You can just imagine the company saying that they want every customer to have a 10 experience so that’s what they will measure and reward for. The problem – for this salesperson, at least – is that the focus shifted from providing an 10 experience to getting a 10. This is key: the focus shifted from the customer’s experience to the salesperson’s ratings.

This sounds similar, but it is very different. Because the salesperson was so worried about his ratings, he never bothered to provide service worth rating. I need to mention that she is one of the kindest, non-confrontational, charitable people one could hope to meet. She does not gripe or complain maliciously, yet had little good to say about the salesperson. Some highlights of my co-worker’s experience:

The car was being shipped because what she wanted wasn’t in stock the day it was purchased. Rather than keeping her posted, she had to constantly hunt down and badger the salesperson to find out the status of her order.

Whenever she pointed out his poor efforts, he blamed other people. In fact, it sounded like he spent the entire time saying, “You are going to give me a 10, aren’t you? It was never my fault things went wrong. You need to give me a 10.”

She was told that if she gave the salesperson and the dealer a 10 on the survey they would give her a free oil change.

The salesperson said that if she wasn’t going to give him a 10 it would probably be best if she didn’t do the survey at all.

She had to endure a bunch of whining about just how hard his life is and why she really needed to give him a 10.

He was so obsessed with getting a 10 that she hesitates to give less out of a mild concern of some type of retribution.

The whole thing sounded boring, repetitive, insulting, and possibly immoral. If you want a 10, do 10 work. If you can’t do 10 work and your career hinges on it, find another career.

I wonder if the company knows how much their dealers and salespeople are aggressively gaming the system? Punishing for anything less than a 10 seems counterproductive because if forces people to be short-sighted and silly and ultimately creates an experience that discourages repeat sales. People make mistakes, things go wrong, customers can be unreasonable, some people will never give a top rating except at gunpoint, etc. Insisting on continuous very, very high performance is fine, but it places much greater emphasis on outstanding hiring and very thorough training.

A top performer will still stand out and rise above when things go bad and try to make it right because they are focused on delivering a great experience, regardless of the circumstances. Marginal performers will retreat into fear and self-preservation. Their well-meaning system forces these extremes.

How would you set it up differently if you were the parent company?

creating HR value

Creating value is about making things simpler, easier, better, quicker, or more effective for the customer. If it’s not solving our customer’s problems – and solving them better than the other options – it’s time to seriously re-evaluate why we’re doing it. Unfortunately, bad HR doesn’t get that: 1) HR has customers; and 2) it’s all about customer service.

[I originally wrote this in response to a great blog post by Tim Sackett but it stands alone pretty well.]

keep it simple, make it easy

Want to know a secret of great businesses, of great customer service, of just getting stuff done? If you want someone to do something, make it as easy as possible for them to do it.

The best example is Amazon and their 1-click checkout. It doesn’t get any easier to give a business my money. Although it sounds intuitive, there are tons of examples of businesses that do the opposite. For example, I used to live near a dry cleaner that didn’t take debit cards (?!?). They never understood that forcing me to go to an ATM before getting my cleaning pretty much ensured I used a different cleaner.

There are many examples that are much, much subtler. This is on my mind because just this week alone, I was assaulted with several examples of people wanting something from me but making it very difficult to do:

  • A company I’m a certified trainer for emailed to let me know that revised materials were now available on their website. But no mention of where. It took me a good five minutes to track them down when a hyperlink in the email would have taken them no more effort and would made it a snap for me to find (and use) the new materials.
  • A friend forwarded a newsletter on training and l liked it enough to go to the website to subscribe. Unfortunately, they REQUIRE me to give name, company, address, email, phone number, some demographic info about the company, etc. I just wanted a newsletter, not a relationship. If they had only asked for an email I would have subscribed then they could have wowed me into buying their products. Instead, they made it easier for them to do a sales call to me, but made it harder for me so now they won’t get the chance.
  • I received an email that wanted me to provide some information and then told me where I could find the address to send it rather than just providing the address. What? The odds of me replying went down substantially.
  • I’m attending a training in the fall and was sent a reminder that “to sign up if I hadn’t already”. There are – maybe – 30 people eligible for the training and they couldn’t look at the roster and send out the reminder to only those who still need to sign up? Instead I received an email that I didn’t need to get UNLESS I haven’t signed up yet and only thought I did so now I have to email them just to confirm.

That was all just this week. Great customer service – great leadership – means finding ways to remove barriers to action – not adding them.

keepin’ it relevant

Recently my daughter and some friends were doing a scavenger hunt where they followed a series of clues to discover the prize at the end. One of the clues was, “The place where we get bills.” Immediately, my daughter rushed to the computer because that’s where we pay bills. Uh oh. The last thing a business wants is to be irrelevant to the customer.

Your business, your department, and even you become irrelevant to your customers the second they no longer think of you as a resource and solution to their problems. Few think about it that way, but it’s true. Customers are trying to solve a problem they have and need you to do it. Put another way, from the customer’s point of view, your business (department, team, etc.) is useful and relevant only if you can solve their problem.

Banks exist to solve the problems of safely storing and accessing money. Lawnmowers exist to solve the problem of an unkempt lawn. Car dealers exist to solve personal transportation problems. Human Resources departments exist to solve the problems of finding, hiring, managing, and developing people. And so on. Internal or external, it doesn’t matter – your job is to help your customers solve their problems.

When salespeople don’t listen to the customer, they don’t (can’t!) provide solutions. When employees judge their worth to the company by their tenure rather than the problems they are solving, they are missing the point. When HR departments focus on administration they are solving only the lowest level of problems (which are easily outsourced). When your potential customers avoid you or work around you or tolerate you because you are the only option (for now), you become a problem to them.

You become a problem that they will look to someone else to solve.

simplify, then add lightness

I’m a big fan of good policy and process because it allows for quick, consistent, and better decision making. It says that when this event happens, we respond this way. No agonizing, no reinventing the wheel, no he said/she saids or playing mom off of dad. Policy defines how we as a company have decided – in advance – to deal with certain situations. Process defines how we will do certain tasks and ultimately supports and makes it easy to adhere to policies.

Great policies and processes enable decisions to be made as quickly and as low in the organization as possible. Decisions made on the ground are always more relevant to the immediate situation than decisions made even one or two levels up.

The problems start when we adhere to policy for the sake of policy, rather than to help make better decisions. Policy should guide thinking and decision making, not replace it. Once we let policy and process replace judgment and thinking, then we must exponentially expand the number of policies and procedures to cover every possible situation that could possibly come up. When new situations arise, even one-time anomalies, another policy must be added. The more specific the policies, the more policies we must have. Soon, we’re crushed with bureaucracy and we’re safe because we’re sticking with policy even when it’s the wrong thing to do.

Unfortunately, thriving in this world requires dealing with new situations. Little to no innovation is possible in bureaucracy. The tighter the policies, the less judgment allowed, the higher in the organization decisions must be made and the less we are able to innovate, adapt, and invent.

Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus Cars and legendary race car engineer, famously once said that the secret to building a winning race car is to “simplify, then add lightness.” Simple parts and systems are less likely to break. Reducing weight makes a car quicker, better handling, more responsive, and reduces the amount of strain and wear on critical components. He understood cars, but might have well been talking about organizations.

The internet is full of people babbling on about the need for companies to be more innovative, react more quickly, and adapt faster. But it misses a crucial point: nimble companies react quickly, ponderous companies don’t. You can’t be driving along in a city bus and expect it to stop, accelerate, and turn on a dime just because you want it to. Mass creates momentum. Yet, we smugly suggest that bus size companies should behave like race cars.

Solution? Simplify, then add lightness. Good policy and process provides just enough framework to make decisions consistent with the strategic direction of the company. And not a gram more.

Four prime examples:

1. The US Constitution. This document is a miracle of simplicity. The few Americans who have actually bothered to read it know that it is amazingly stripped down and simple. In fact, it’s only about 7,400 words long (call it about 16 pages). Knowing that they couldn’t accurately imagine every possible situation that would need to be accounted for, the authors simply created an enduring framework that would enable adaptation. It was so simple and brief that they had to immediately amend it to establish and protect basic rights.

2. Nordstrom. Nordstrom’s focus is customer service and they want nothing to get in the way of employees providing phenomenal service. Their entire employee handbook is reported as listing only ONE rule: “Use good judgment in all situations.” And then there is brief mention to feel free to ask the department or store manager or HR any question at any time.

3. Apple Computers. Steve Jobs genius was not leadership: it was an unrelenting focus to make things as simple as humanly possible and then make them even simpler. How many steps does it take to get to any song on an iPod? (Hint: you won’t come even close to using all the fingers on one hand when you’re counting.)

4. Amazon. 1-click ordering. Enough said.

Um, how big’s your policy manual again? How many pages does the dress code really need to be? How many steps are truly necessary to for a customer to return an item? How easy is it for the customer to give you their money?

you say you want a revolution: three steps to changing culture

Company culture . Can’t escape hearing about it, but why is it important? Stripped of all buzzword mystique, culture is just “the way things are done” in the organization (or the team). It’s the personality of the company. Just like people, some are stiff and precise, some are loose and casual, and some are all over the board. We usually refer to the company, but culture also applies at the department or team level. Every group has its own feel or culture.

If the culture isn’t what you want, no problem. Changing the culture of a company, department, or even a team isn’t easy, but it is possible. It takes time, patience and persistence. There are three broad steps to reshaping the culture.

1. Decide what you want the culture to be. One way of thinking about culture is to consider it the default decisions and actions. When X event happens, we always take Y action. For example, “We have a culture of the highest integrity. When any dishonesty is discovered, we terminate the person immediately.” Or, “We are a customer service culture. When a customer wants to return an item, we always accept it, no questions asked, no hassle involved.”

So what do you want the culture of your team or company to be? What are the characteristics you would want anyone and everyone to use to describe the atmosphere?

Here’s the challenge: whether you consciously and deliberately choose a culture or not, there will be a culture. It will be whatever decisions and actions you support, reward, and tolerate.

2. Design processes and rewards to support that culture. If you’re trying to create a culture of high quality but the pay scale is based on volume, you will have a culture of volume – always. If you want a culture of simple, fast customer service but the processes are onerous, cumbersome, and unfathomable, you will continue to have a culture of complex and cumbersome customer service. If culture is the default way of acting, then the default way of acting IS the culture. Words won’t change it, only action. Different action = different culture. Same action = same culture.

3. Make selection decisions that support the culture. If you want a culture of outstanding customer service, don’t hire misanthropes. New hires should have the skills to do the job (duh!) but also the behaviors and inclinations that will allow them to both support and thrive in the culture you are creating. People who won’t support the desired behaviors/actions will be a continual drain on the culture. If they already exist in the team/company, they need to move along to a company with a culture better suited to them. NOTHING destroys attempts at shaping culture quicker than continuing to reward and employ people whose actions are in clear opposition to the intended culture.

For example, if you want a culture of integrity do not continue to employ people who clearly lack it just because, “they get results.” Doing so, only reinforces a culture of getting short term results by any means necessary.

There you go: know what you want to create, reward and support the necessary behaviors, and make selection (and de-selection) decisions that support what you want. Have patience and perseverance. It won’t change overnight, but it will change.

the secret behind persuasion, change management, and talk radio political debates

People don’t want to discover the best solution. They want to believe their solution is best. And they are very threatened by data, evidence, or thoughts suggesting otherwise.

the next small thing

I suspect that too often we are waiting for the next big thing when we would really benefit from looking for the next little thing. It is the little things that can make the biggest difference in our lives.

Buying groceries is about as mundane as it gets yet the grocery store is great fodder for the subtle differences between getting it right, getting by, and screwing it up. This weekend, after waiting forever in the checkout line I noticed that there wasn’t a bagger helping out the cashier. Yet there was a bagger standing around talking to the next cashier over whose line had just emptied.

An A-player would have looked over, seen that there was work to do, and gotten the groceries bagged as quickly as the cashier was scanning them. Instead, this bagger chose to wait until all the groceries were scanned and I was paying for them to come over and help the cashier bag everything up. The total time difference to me was probably about three minutes. Not a big deal, yet I left the store irritated at the indifferent service. And, multiply three minutes across all the shoppers and it’s no wonder the lines had been moving slowly.

Did the groceries get bagged? Yep. Did the bagger do their job? Good enough to stay employed. But keeping an eye out for the next opportunity to serve would make a big difference and take almost no more effort. The sad thing is they probably think they are doing a good job and will never understand why they aren’t getting ahead.

When we wonder why our businesses, departments, or teams aren’t as successful as they should be, when we wonder why our career seems to have stalled, is it possible that we are overlooking the simple things that open the gap between average and outstanding?

 

A-player opportunities rarely come to B-players. The best opportunities come to those who are already doing a great job.  And it is typically the little things that separate good from great. A question to be asking is, “What could I do right now to make things quicker, easier, or more pleasant for my customers?”

it’s the little things

I despise and resent pre-paying for gas. I find it to be a major pain in the rear. Either I pay at the pump with a card and then go in and pay again (because I’m probably going to get a snack or soda while I’m there), pay once and forego my snack, or make several trips back and forth and stand in line a few times.

It’s interesting how quickly we humans adjust to and even expect such poor service. With nearly 100% of gas stations now requiring pre-pay we deem such lousy treatment acceptable and the norm. Why?

Hmmm. That’s a bit tougher. Certainly we all understand that this prevents drive offs, but how big of a problem is it really? Imagine if you couldn’t try on clothes until after you’d paid for them because it helped prevent shop lifting. Makes sense, but is it an acceptable solution, and would anyone shop there? No. That’s why stores use other measures to prevent theft.

I’ll admit, this sounds like a silly point of contention if only because the pre-pay system is so prevalent. Aren’t their bigger injustices to rail against? Sure. But how many other industries could inconvenience their customers, treat everyone who shops there like a criminal, and still thrive?

I go out of my way to pay more for gas because there is a local convenience store that will let me pump first. That’s how strongly I feel about it. Not everyone feels the way I do, but I can’t help but wonder about other people’s pet peeves. I’m sure other examples abound of people accepting higher price or having to go a bit out of their way because they prefer the service, selection, product, whatever at a certain store.

The challenge is that when everyone’s doing it and customers don’t have a choice it’s hard to identify these areas. I remember when I first moved to the Midwest back in the mid-nineties. I was in a mildly rural area and customer service was horrendously bad. But it was so universally terrible it was simply a case of “it is what it is” and no one knew different or cared. Then the big box stores came in. Say what you will about them, they had much better service and forced all the other companies to play catch up. Within a few years, the overall customer service for the entire area had improved markedly.

You can really only compete on price or differentiation. Being lowest cost is a losing battle for most. That leaves differentiation which means providing a product or service different enough to be worth paying a little more for. That might be selection, customer service, outstanding return policy, unique product or knowledge, etc.

Whatever your business or field, I can spend five minutes on google and find someone offering it cheaper. Let’s put this in an HR perspective (please tweak to think about from your business/field’s point of view): it wouldn’t take long to find a vendor that I could outsource your entire HR department to for less than your company is paying for internal HR right now. Keeping HR internal is not the cheapest option. So what value are you providing that differentiates you from your competition?

Where are you making life more difficult for your customers because it’s more convenient for you? What are the things your customers really value? What could you do that would be free or low-cost that would make life easier for your customers? These questions are doubly valuable if you are in a support department and have internal customers. Without external options it’s easy to get slack. Try this on: if your internal customers had three other options for your product or service would they choose you? Why should they?