From Scott McKain:
Customer service is bad at most places, because evidently that is what CEO’s and managers want. What other reason could there be for them to accept such miserable performance?
Most care more about selling than serving. We know that when sales decline, companies will buy ads, offer new customers better deals than existing ones, deliver training, hold major events, and take any number of extraordinary measures to pump up revenue. They are passionate and precise about customer acquisition — but reserved and reticent about customer retention.
Here’s evidence: most companies have annual sales rallies – how many have one every year for customer service?
Educated and cared-for employees should be prepared to deliver “Ultimate Customer Experiences ®” to everyone spending money with you. In turn, these customers replicate their purchases, and refer you to their friends and colleagues. Your business grows.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
If everybody – from front line employees, to entrepreneurs, to major corporate executives – would create experiences so compelling to customers that their loyalty becomes assured, organizations would experience enhanced levels of both acquisition and retention.
Yet, if it’s not the priority of the leadership or owners – why should the folks on the front line get excited about it?
To find out more about Scott McKain, go to: www.ScottMcKain.com
From Larry Winget:
Customer service is bad because we allow it to be bad. What do you do when you get bad service? Tell the truth. Most do nothing. Most people simply don’t have the cojones to speak up when they get bad service. They don’t tell the person delivering it. They don’t ask for a manager. They don’t leave an online review. At most, they might – maybe – possibly (though probably not) stop shopping with that business.
If you aren’t willing to speak up, then you are an accessory to the crime. You have allowed a crime to happen and stayed silent about it. Shame on you. You owe it to yourself, the next shopper and to the company to speak up in an effort to make things better in the future. You can’t ignore bad service and expect it to get better. Behavior that is ignored will be repeated. It’s a law. Write it down.
Next time you get bad service, speak up. Remember: it’s your money you are defending – money you worked hard for. Tell the company and others. Use the internet and social media. That’s how customer service will improve for all of us.
Larry Winget, the Pitbull of Personal Development©, is a six-time NYT/WSJ bestselling author, social commentator and appears regularly on many national television news shows. To find out more, go to www.LarryWinget.com.
From Mark Sanborn:
Larry makes a great point about the customer’s culpability in enabling bad customer service. Here is the employer’s role:
1. Customer service isn’t taught. No matter how motivated an employee is, they can’t perform a job without the right skills. (And don’t confuse “smile and grin” training with true customer service training. There is more to great service than simply “being nice.”)
2. It isn’t rewarded. Most organizations pay no more attention to those who provide great service than those who don’t. As the old adage goes, what gets rewarded gets done. The corollary is what doesn’t get rewarded usually stops being done.
3. It isn’t required. If delivering extraordinary service isn’t part of the job description, don’t be surprised when you don’t get it and get push back when you “request” it. Great service shouldn’t be an option.
Require your team to provide great service. Just make sure you teach them how and reward them appropriately when they do.
Mark Sanborn is president of Sanborn & Associates, Inc., an idea studio for leadership development. He is an award-winning speaker bestselling author of books including, The Fred Factor. For more information and free resources, visit www.marksanborn.com.
From Joe Calloway:
At 90+% of the places I do business, customer service runs from good to absolutely great. I travel a lot, and renting a car used to be torture. Now I hit about 4 clicks on the rental website, get to the airport, walk into the lot and pick any car I want (I tend to rent from National), and drive away. I recently returned some hiking boots I’d worn for a while to REI (I wasn’t happy with the fit.) They smiled, got a salesperson to help me with another pair, and I was on my way. The kids working at Chik-fil-A are friendly, efficient, and the chicken is good. Amazon Prime is one button to buy and ships in two days. Zappos service is legend. My car dealer loans me a new car to use when I get mine serviced.
“But wait! You aren’t going to the places with bad service!”
Exactly. Read Larry Winget’s post on this. If I get bad service, I fire them. I don’t go back and I tell them why and they don’t get my money any more. Lousy service happens when customers let them get away with it.
Joe Calloway helps great companies get even better. www.JoeCalloway.com
From Randy Pennington:
My friends are correct – service is bad because leaders want and/or allow it.
From my experience, this leadership failure is rooted in one critical idea: Companies with bad service view it as a cost to be managed rather than an investment that creates a competitive advantage.
This view will never be acknowledged. In fact, most companies say that they strive for service excellence. Words are not action, however. Focus on these three areas if you want to make service your competitive advantage:
1. People: Who do you hire? How are they trained, compensated, and rewarded? Do your front-line leaders develop them and provide a great environment in which to work? Who is promoted, and who is fired?
2. Process: Is every process clearly defined, documented, and communicated? Are your processes designed to deliver the best possible result for the customer or the least expensive result for the company? Do you continually evaluate and update processes to stay current and relevant?
3. Tools: Do your people have the resources and information they need to succeed? Are they empowered to actually use the tools at their disposal?
Stop managing service as a cost. Start leading it as an investment.
Randy Pennington helps leaders deliver positive results in a world of accelerating change. To find out more, go to www.penningtongroup.com.
It is a great post but I believe their review to be somewhat superficial and lacking review of common threads that link that type of behavior. I also get the impression that their exposure is not reflective of typical real-world experiences and the analytics that come from that. I think the problem is more of a general reflection of our society and how we treat each other, the growing disparity between classes (this metric is important when looking at the company dynamics) and a sense of entitlement. This is also demonstrated as a regional problem with even clear distinctions, of identical companies, from town to town. It is amazing the amount of difference in customer service at identical companies at different locations.
Employers cannot DEMAND that their employees provide good customer service, they must INCENTIVISE it.
Employees will treat the customers in the same manner that management treats the employees.
The common thinking these days is that employees are an expense, not an asset. Therefore companies all over have been running skeleton crews 24/7.
I love Mr McKain’s and Mr. Pennington’s insightful comments on why customer service is bad and only seems to be going worse.
In my experience, whenever you experience bad customer service, especially any kind of customer service that involves a contact center, the experience is bad BY DESIGN. Because the priority for company management is not customer satisfaction, rather it is sales or even worse as Mr. Pennington suggests, it is cost control.
Perhaps more bizarrely, the very emphasis in process that is supposed to improve the experience works against it and turns customer service into a bureaucratic nightmare where the priority becomes satisfying some arbitrary set of metrics instead of providing the kind of resolution paying customers expect and deserve.
Just come across this hence the ‘late’ comment. Larry Winget in his comment says it is because people don’t complain enough. Maybe that is true, but increasingly I find companies make it impossible for you to complain – they clearly don’t want you to or they would make it easier.
Just today I came across a (film distribution) site where i needed to let them know that there links were not giving the info required, but there were no contact details available whatsoever: no phone number; no website, nothing. (I think this should be illegal, just as any magazine or book publisher is by law bound to provide details including printers, publishers etc, so they should be legally required to provide details.)
In another case involving the UK’s largest telephone company, now branching out into TV and entertainment in a big way, the only way to contact them is by phone or ordinary mail – no email allowed, it seems. Yes, I have tried phoning but has no effect – merely contact to an overseas call centre which sympathises but doesn’t know what to do except “I’ll raise it at our next team meeting”.
Over a longer period I have had problems with Neff, a supposedly up market major European electricals manufacturer. A few years ago I bought five items for my kitchen. Every one of them has failed in various ways, some multiple. But I have had little sympathy or recompense from them. I now tell people about my bad experience whenever and wherever I can, but it has little effect.
My conclusions from these and other experiences, both my own and other people’s, is that many companies merely pay lip service to customer care: they say they do but actually don’t in practice.
There are, of course, those that do, but I think we are losing the battle overall.
I agree with some of the statements, more so with the comments from Payne and Bowser about class distinctions, sense of entitlement and incentive. Incentive among employees is as important as anything else. You can’t pay minimum wage or the lowest wage possible, increase their workload in order for employers expected profits, keep employees stuck there and expect them to provide good service consistently. I was in Japan a couple of years ago, the overall difference in customer service there is amazing. I realize it is a more homogenous ethnic society, but it seems like they have a commitment to customers that is often lacking here, they get it that a satisfied customer repeats business, tells others. It seems like a symbiotic relationship between employer and employees rather than an adversarial one.
I don’t agree that great customer service shouldn’t be required of course if the goal of the company is to chase people away and only have rude customers like themselves then okay but at least they need to be clear about it. I think what is happening is a deeper problem in our society regardless where a person lives. People just don’t care anymore about each other. Families don’t spend time with each other unless it is all planned and some don’t get together at all. People then also have put their jobs over God, their family and friends and then there is stress and that stress is brought to work and unloaded on the customers, other employees, manufacturers, farmers or whoever the person is in contact with. I find it strange when he said good service isn’t required. Once upon a time there was a friendly man or woman that was behind the counter and would give a what you needed. I think another problem we forgot our roots and where we came from. Also our celebrity obsessed culture is unhealthy because there is this great divide that they get treated better by corporations and organizations especially if he or she endorses their products while everyday people really don’t do this. They need to be taught but better yet parents need to take the responsibility first to teach their children manners. Today children are not taught that anymore and just put in front of tv with processed food which makes their brain and hormones etc. unstable to the point they become hostile and they get addicted to that food and when they are older they are overweight are on tons of pills live a alone ( there are more people living alone in U.S. then in other countries) which leads to isolation anxiety and depression and they are in a horrible job which is customer service and get minimum wage because they weren’t taught anything in school therefore cannot attend any type of further education and if they do they get in debt and more anger more frustration. Then they get bombarded with ridiculous shows, movies, news etc. about how the 1% live in their big mansions, big yachts, travel constantly and yes a person doesn’t need to watch that but then their is the constant bombardment of advertisements for pricy items and a luxurious lifestyle the many people only obtain through debt and more debt. Remember Hurricane Katrina the rest of the world was shocked that there is poverty is the U.S. I am from Europe and I remember a close relative of mine thought Minnesota was next to California and some people think every American has a swimming pool and a large mansion. What is the solution? A simpler lifestyle with less material possessions which is actually helpful because then a person does not have the added stress of maintaining an unhealthy lifestyle. Stuff doesn’t make people happy God, family and friends do. We need to know our neighbors once again and need to stop believing everyone is a terrorist or everyone is always evil, selfish, racist and the other words we like to throw around so much I wonder if they even have any meaning left at all.