What a Customer Should Never Hear

How to change an employee culture toward customer problems

Thu, 08/02/2018 - 12:03

‘There’s nothing we can do about it.”

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In a customer service situation, those words are equivalent to “buzz off” (or worse).

Here’s what customer service managers, from healthcare to telecommunications, from utilities to gyms, should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids: Because employees feel powerless to deal with customer problems, they default to the most brain-dead, frustrating response a customer can hear: “Well, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s out of our hands.”

Where do they get that attitude? Where did they get the training or mentoring that creates such a visceral employee response? From you, the managers. The ones, as the late, great, W. Edwards Deming famously put it, “that are in charge of 94 percent of all the problems because that’s the percent of the problems caused by the system that you idiots set up!”

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Comments

Excellent! However, I must take exception to the concept of management requiring an idea per month from each employee. A quota for ideas is, in my estimation, an oxymoron.

That being said, in defence of the management I would ask, "Have they had other complaints?" They are running a business and, just as they have no idea that the treadmill is broken, if nobody raises their hand, as you did, and says, "Problem here!", it is off their radar. (Actually, they probably will find the treadmill issue during normal service.) 

For varied reasons, the vast majority of customers will not complain. When told, "We've never heard that.", I generally reply, "Lot's of people probably have the same issue, they just don't complain." 

Thanks Alan. I do admit that requiring a set number of ideas from employees is a bit at odds with my comments about Deming, as he was terrifically opposed to quotas, goals, targets, or any form of "arbitrary" number. But I have observed that it can be quite effective to tell employees that it is expected that they will come up with several customer service improvements over the course of the year. Inevitably you get asked "how many?" So saying a dozen a year, is just breaking it down to a monthly schedule. But I do understand your point.

Much of my opinions about this stem from the wonderful quality circle era in the USA, a sadly largely failed effort. In our study tours to Japan, they often described participation as "voluntary" but as we learned over the following two years, participating in quality control circles was by no means voluntary--it was expected.  For their robust suggestion system, Matsushita Electric "encouraged" five ideas per month per employee for quality and productivity improvement, but in truth a better phrase would have been "Firmly expected unless you're out ill or on vacation, on special assignment, or too new to know the system."  

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