Last month, I wrote about several unsatisfying interactions with call center representatives and retail clerks. As I pondered these customer service failures and the lessons they held for MCLS, I also thought about the ultimate responsibility for the problems I experienced. In each of these cases, I believe the fault occurred long before I got on the phone or walked through the door and started talking to the company’s representative.
Organizations lay the foundation for customer service failure when they fail to bring the customer’s or community’s view into their service plans. It’s a simple thing to ask, “How does this look to the people we’re serving? Will it make sense to them? Will they be able to get what they want easily and with minimum fuss?” Simple questions. But perhaps the answers aren’t simple, which may explain why they aren’t always asked. Too often, we make our decisions about the products or services that we want to offer based on internal needs and not our community’s wishes, and we don’t think about the questions or requests that we’re going to get. It’s a trap that can make extrication hard when the complaints start to come in.
Even when we start with the community’s perspective, we may be setting ourselves up for problems by not properly training our employees. Every employee needs to be trained to provide good customer service. You may think it’s common sense for a person at the circulation desk to smile, make eye contact, and greet the person at the head of the line. It’s not. We as managers must make our expectations known in clear, concise, and explicit language. When the sales guy at the stereo store sat on the couch talking on the phone while I wandered aimlessly around, it’s easy to say that he’s a lousy sales guy. In fact, this wasn’t the first time that I experienced such behavior at that store, which leads me to conclude that the store’s management never provided training or guidance to the sales staff. It is very likely that the store’s management simply tolerates bad behavior.
Perhaps you have a really good training program and all of your front-line staff are thoroughly grounded in your standards for excellent customer service, and you’re still coming up short. Every organization has infrastructure that it puts into place to keep it running efficiently. That infrastructure includes business processes as well as physical setups, such as information technology and the building plan. Too often computer systems, workflows, and business processes become excuses for not providing good customer service. When I wrote about my chat with the utility call center representative, I have no doubt that she couldn’t solve my problem by re-running my credit card. Well, why not? It seemed like such an obvious solution to my problem, but apparently it wasn’t something their systems staff had considered. How often had it come up before? How many other customers would have been well-served by allowing the system to do this? Every computer system operates in the way it does because of management decisions. Changing how it operates is also a management decision.
Simply put, customer service failure is usually an indication of mismanagement or managerial inadequacy, and it is up to management to take a holistic perspective to determine the fix. Ad hoc, complaint-by-complaint solutions won’t solve underlying training or systems problems.
That’s not to say that every single employee failure is because of management inadequacy. Gross misconduct such as stealing, lying, and insubordination happens despite our best effort to ensure employee success. Sometimes, too, we hire the wrong person, and he or she shouldn’t have been offered a seat on our organizational bus. Most of the time, we can help make employees successful and ensure excellent customer service through a combination of solid training, thoughtful system design, and appropriate empowerment. When we can’t, we owe it to our community, to our organization, and to the unsuccessful employee to move them out of the job.
When complaints come in, and it’s inevitable that they will, you have the opportunity to look at your policies, your training, and your systems to make sure they are all aligned with your values and intention to provide outstanding service to your community.
Don’t forget that our next Coffee with the Executive Director is Friday morning, July 7. Join us at 9am Eastern (8am Central) for the conversation. July’s meeting ID is 608 643 719. You can submit your questions in advance, or find out more about logging in here. Talk to you then!
