Customer Service: a different approach

Looking at what professionals say about customer service leads me to believe that they have no idea what it is or at best, they just throw around a bunch of jargon they learned at some seminar on customer service and think that's what they are providing.

The most important aspect of customer service is where it comes from. If it comes from a seminar, from a manual or some part of a corporate mandate from the home office... it just wont work. Let me share a story. I was a one of two supervisors for a national pizza company. The owner of the company was concerned with the number of complaints received when the company opened up a 1-800 complaint line. He decided to implement a new customer complaint resolution program. The company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for and implement the program system wide (the company is international). Supervisors were expected to take 3 large manuals that were written to resolve every imaginary scenario that a store manager would come up against. There was role playing, videos and scripts to memorize. All designed to resolve customer complaints. Stores were to add hundreds of man hours to practice these resolutions with crew members and management. I poured over every page of these manuals...hundred of pages! When my co-supervisor and I were done looking at the manuals, I sat there thinking. After a while, I looked at Tim and said, "Timmy, is it possible that after following every guideline in these manuals, a customer could still leave one of our stores unhappy?" He thought for a while and said, yes. I said, " I agree". We threw the manuals in the trash. I proclaimed that in our market..."No customer will leave our any of our stores unhappy. Period. We will do whatever it takes to make sure the customer gets what he expected. We will fix any problem to the 100% satisfaction of every customer, period! My observation of our managers with unhappy customers showed me that the entire conversation was adversarial. Our managers were looking at the customer like the enemy, as if the customer was after a freebee and our managers were fighting them on every front. We needed to change their conversation about our customers...which was not easy. People often asked what I did for a living and I would say," I spend my whole day telling fish they are in water!" The fish would always say " What water???? What are you talking about? When you are able to pull their butts out of the water and they can look down and around, they go...oh, ya...Water! This is what I call making a distinction. When they got it...it being they were treating customers like the enemy, there was now room to start treating them differently. I had always told my managers how they are expected to treat everyone who comes in contact with us, employees and customers. I will give you an example. People believe that we should respect someone based on how they respect us. I will respect you if you earn it. Everyone would agree with that statement. I said, "That's not how we do it." We show respect because of who we are. As a truly free individual, my actions are my own. I do what I do because of who and what I am and it has nothing to do with what anyone else does or does not do! If my actions are dependent on what others do or say, then I am not free... I am their slave and I do not control my actions or my life.

So, we will treat the customer in a way that serves the interest of the customer and only the customers interest. We will not care if they are trying to cheat us and in fact, the thought will not even cross our mind. We will serve because it is within us to do so. We serve because of who we are and what we are is a stand to impact people in a positive way every chance we get.

We started a bonus system that rewarded the manager who did the craziest, most unconventional thing to satisfy a customer. All the managers voted on who did the wildest thing. We did this until strange and wild became common and an every day occurrence. Well, it didn't take too much time for the president and vise president of the company(along with their lil minions) to come snooping around our market. They went store to store until I met up with them at our flagship store. I asked out regional VP what was up. He said, "HR and operations was wondering if we posted the 1-800 complaint numbers in our stores and on our bounce back fliers". They discovered that we did. I asked what made them think we had not and Steve said because the number of complaints system wide was up 18 to 23 % and our market had zero complaints! They asked what we were doing different and after we explained, the owner's son looked at the operations VP and asked, "How much did our customer service program cost us to roll out?" Ops said, a little over a million. The kid shook his head and said, all we had to do was make sure no one left our store unhappy? Ops said, I guess. Everyone in the company followed every line written in the program but it wasn't coming from them. It was doing a thing, something said or some action that was done to the customer but not FOR THE CUSTOMER. No one got the distinction of what a happy customer was. They were following a script and the customer knew it...they had no interest in serving the customer because it was not in them to do it or if it was, it was covered up by the conversation, your not going to rip us off or some similar conversation.

Customer service comes from who you are...someone who cares about others more than you care for yourself. It comes from an expression of love that hopefully came from the same love your mother showed you all your life. It comes from kindness that resides within you and in fact...is you. We get to show up how we want the world to see us by how we act. When I walk into someone home, I am there to serve. To take all my talent and skills and apply them to my trade... I do alot of things for free and beyond my customer's expectation and I don't do it for money, more business or recognition. I do it because of who I am.