Doing Penance for the 7 Sins in Customer Service

Everything you do in business is marketing.

The forms you ask your customers to fill out, the time they wait in line, the confusing phone recoding systems -- all messages from your brand.

What do they say about you?

Too few organizations are starting to pay attention to those experiences and coming up with new solutions.

Traditional ways of thinking prevent us from divining the most accurate—and elegant—of solutions to any problem solving situation, writes Matt May in mind of the innovator: taming the traps of traditional thinking.

Can customer service become elegant? Is your business doing penance for the 7 sins it commits when it comes to customers?

(1.) Shortcutting -- making a beeline for the solution without first analyzing the root cause of the problem could lead you to drawing the wrong conclusions.

Our brain is trained to jump to conclusions, to take shortcuts, and experience compounds that trait. However, it is also experience that teaches us that root cause analysis is helpful to know which questions you're answering.

Incidentally, when you start thinking about problems differently, you also come up with entirely new ways of doing things, which may lead to significant innovation in customer care.

(2.) Blind spots -- these are part of our mental narrative, our assumptions given previous experience. We fill in to complete our existing mental patterns. If your part of the conversation is pre-filled, where does that leave the other party? 

What assumptions do you have in approaching customer calls and customer service situations? How are these assumption preventing you from actually addressing the issue?

(3.) Not invented here -- by nature, we don't trust other people's solutions. Period. See if you identify yourself with this situation. You have an idea that you think will save the company costs in the long run and will make customers really happy. You propose the idea and it falls flat.

Two months later, a consultant comes in to work with the top team and they come up with the very same idea... and this time it gets adopted, because it was the top group's idea and it took time and an investment with a third party to flesh it out.

(4.) Satisficing -- this is a challenge of our times, there is no incubation period for ideas, we need to implement right away. In case you were wondering, satisfice is the combination of satisfy and suffice, a term economist and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon coined in his 1957 Models of Man to describe the typical human decision-making process by which we go with the first option that offers an acceptable payoff.

Is your customer service a base minimum requirement kind of activity? Are you asking the right questions or trying to provide the quickest answers?

(5.) Downgrading -- this is the close cousin of the previous one, with a twist: a formal revision of the goal or situation. Here you twist and sift the facts to suit your solution. Or you provide a “revised estimate" that gets you off the hook from providing a real resolution.

When you downgrade the problem, you have the comfort of thinking that you can do that with the solution as well. That is rarely the case.

(6.) Complicating -- our brains are wired to make things more complicated that they are. We add - cost and complexity - naturally and consistently. The first instinct when someone gives us a problem to solve is to start compounding it with information that leads us astray.

We hoard, store, collect, and accumulate behavior.

(7.) Stifling -- this is the most unproductive and destructive of all sins. It can prevent someone from trying at all. In some organizations, most ideas are killed before they even get a chance to be shared. See if you've heard this before - this is not the way we do things here; that's never been done; customers won't go for that; we don't have time to do it.

The best one of all might be -- we're going through a recession right now... ba-bing, idea killed.

What is your favorite way of killing ideas? How have your ideas been killed most frequently? Are you the number one person responsible for your ideas not getting done?

These are all ways to either openly say no, or to avoid thinking differently altogether.

I posted a version of this content two years ago. Are businesses still wrestling with this one? It seems to me they are. And next week we'll talk about the drain on your resources from from poorly engineered programs designed to strong arm buyers into serial dis-loyalty.

 

[image of 7 colors for 7 days by Davic]

If you enjoyed this post from Conversation Agent, subscribe, share and like it.

Comments

[Ivan Walsh]

Hi Valeria,

Apple may be great but....

When we bought the ipad over the web, we gave them two phones numbers.

When their courier arrived to deliver, they left a note saying undeliverable.

We were both at home! The front door bell is busted, so they left...

You’d think they’d call either number... instead of coming back a second time, which must cost money.

And... the call centre is 9-6 only and closed on weekends, and bank holidays.

I’m stunned at how badly the managed this.

[Mark Copeman]

Complicating - too right Valeria...!

The customer satisfaction survey is a classic. 20 pages of questions, once a year.

A total waste of time in our book!

Why? For two reason - it puts the onus on the customer and it's always way too late and non-real time.

You quite rightly say:

"Too few organizations are starting to pay attention to those experiences and coming up with new solutions."

We'd like to think we are with

http://www.customerthermometer.com

Great article!

Best wishes,
Mark Copeman

[Valeria Maltoni]

I see that as a failure in the way the supply chain -- shipping co -- is set up, not of Apple itself. They do that. It has happened to me with UPS. They require the phone number, yet don't call it *when* at your doorstep. My hunch tells me they have a route and incentives to make time on it.

[Valeria Maltoni]

thank you for stopping by, Mark. May I suggest a different approach instead of just sharing a link and saying you do all these great things? That puts the onus on the community to come and check it out. I'd rather think you were looking to engage with the community.