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Shocked by Good Customer Service! 3 Principles for Good Customer Service

August 14, 2009 By 3 Comments

Since I have moved back to the Southeast, I have noticed a dramatic decrease in good customer service. Maybe from living in Dallas and being around some good customer service, my expectations have increased; however, I doubt this. When I worked at FedEx Ground, I was part of the Quality Assurance department as the Quality Manager. One of my responsibilities was handling customer service. While I didn’t do all the things I would want to do now (ie., listen in on calls, record calls, etc.), I was recognized and rewarded for some excellent customer service. While I do not consider myself a customer service expert or connesuir, I do know good customer service when I see it.

So, in the past 3 days, I was shocked by some good customer service. Since arriving in my new city (which was a previous city that I lived so I am very familiar with the culture, which is the reason for some of the poor customer service), my wife and I have experienced a ton of poor customer service. Here are some examples:

  1. My wife listening to front desk doctor office “nurses” talk about vomiting, “getting wasted” in detail, etc. with her right there
  2. Listening to “customer service reps” act as though I am putting them out in asking them to do something
  3. Listening to a special application executive (glorified name for sales rep) for a potential vendor talk about porn on his iPhone and complain about his company’s mistakes while trying to fix a problem (which was the 3rd issue I had in less than 1 week & apparently I was his first & only with these problems) for me with their IT group
  4. Waiting for an hour to receive a to-go order and from another location waiting an hour to receive our dining-in food from a national, causal dining restaurant
  5. Getting my fast food order wrong twice in a row on the same day for the same order!

First, as I just mentioned (#5), I was at Burger King (BK is about 1 mi from my house, how convenient!) recently, and I ordered something that included a Wopper with Cheese. When I got the order, I drove home (of course without checking it because I was in a hurry, which I will start doing) only to find the Whopper made incorrectly. I went back to BK to remedy it and ordered a Large Onion Rings with O-Sauce. Now, in more of a hurry, I grabbed the bag without looking/checking (I’m a slow learner). Upon arriving at home, it was brought to my attention that there were only 5 small onion rings that didn’t even fill the cup! So I went back and showed the person who took my order (and who made the mistake). Acting like she didn’t know, her manager saw that I was back and was upset. She saw the cup and immediately wanted to know who did it, which everyone there said, “I don’t know!” (<- my favorite person). She went to the back and then came back and refunded my order. Even though she didn’t refund the order correctly and shorted me, I was ok with it because of her tenacity and her internal conviction towards good customer service. Being a good customer-focused company doesn’t mean that you have to do everything right the first time, but recognizing that you do something wrong sometimes (hopefully not very often) and fixing it above and beyond the customer’s expectations.

Second, yesterday, my family and I were running about 30 minutes behind our normal schedule for the day (I hate the word routine) for some reason, I forget. And my 3 kids (ages 5, 4, & 2) were begining to “sing” in unison about “how hungry” they were. So my wife and I decided to stop at McDonalds (McDs as we call it). After we ordered and I went to get some ketchup (my kids love to eat fries with their ketchup). However, they were out of ketchup. I told the guy at the front counter, and later, I went to get a refill and some more ketchup (apparently we didn’t get enough packets for all of us). I saw that the guy finished refilling the ketchup machine, so I went to get some. However, there were no mini-cups. So I asked the man, and he said he would get them in a minute after he finishes cleaning the ketchup machine. So I said, “Ok,” and walked back to my seat in the kids playroom. Later, the same guy brings me some ketchup! Surprise! I didn’t even ask him to do that! That was good customer service. Being a good customer-focused company means that you care enough to be aware of what you can do to proactively serve your customer.

Then another customer service sighting today. I have been “talking with” a potential vendor to help my company embark on some social media ventures. I developed an online relationship with Dave Wilkins (@dwilkinsnh), who most graciously answered all my questions and when appropriate pointed me to an account manager. However, since Dave, I have had 3 account managers with this company (Mzinga), probably due to some internal issues/reasons. However, none of them wanted to demo anything with me, probably because I was too up front with them. As I tell every vendor, we are a very slow company in making decisions because many people like to be in on the decision. So, once I got a response via email that said, “Thank you for your continued interest. Right now is a tough time to schedule a demo as we are working with a ton of companies who are ready to go from a budget and decision maker buy in stand point.” So just because I wasn’t ready to pull the trigger, I couldn’t get any face time with their product. So I continued my conversation with Dave and others via Twitter. I also began to look to see who Mzinga’s competitors were. In 24 hours of doing this I had demos from their competitors. Still being interested in Mzinga, I finally tweeted, “I have finally determined that it is impossible to actually get a demo from @mzinga. I’ve been trying to get a demo on IdeaShare since Feb.” Within 45 minutes, I had a phone call from someone at Mzinga and two tweets from @mzinga (tweet asking for me to email them) and @rsaari (tweet telling me someone would call me ASAP with an apology). I am not sure if I would have responded to the first response (@mzinga) because that again, in Mzinga fashion (meaning that’s been my experience; should a customer have to pursue a vendor?), put the onus on me. However, I would have and did respond to Randy Saari’s (@rsaari‘) response because he took action and he took responsibility. Maybe that’s one reason why Dave wrote a blog about why he would miss Randy upon leaving Mzinga for Learn.com. Being a good customer-focused company means that you not only take full responsibility for “dropping the ball” but also take action to fix the problem.

Here is another video by David Carroll regarding this last point.

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Customer Service: It’s Everyone’s Job

July 13, 2009 By 7 Comments

During this time of recession, my company’s major objectives are:

  1. Take care of our people individually
  2. Keep our company financially strong
  3. Keep progressing in our vision to be the Biggest and the Best in the Sunbelt.

It is documented and we are doing it. We have increased our new accounts, and we have not layed a single person off or made any major cutbacks (i.e. cutting pension, etc.). Not only have we not laid anyone off, we have been quite creative in ensuring that everyone gets enough hours. During our operating years, we have never had a year where we have ended the year losing money. While we are poised to make it our first unprofitable year, our numbers are at the top of our industry maintaining >99% on-time service and with the lowest claims ration in the past 3 decades.

Having said all this, one thing we are focusing on is Customer Service. We have expanded, increased our technology communications to our customers, and we are also working on a major internal initiative to tune our customer service efforts to a “whole ‘nother level.” Our President wrote and said:

We don’t make or sell anything other than a service, so we all need to understand that we are “here to serve”. The only way we can differentiate ourselves from our competition is through how we serve and this applies to both our internal and our external customers.  The key to giving effective service is to have a servant’s heart…which requires each of us to have a healthy does of humility and a passion for taking care of other peoples’ needs.

Serving is truly part of the corporate culture where I work. Awards are handed out on how well we serve one another. For example, I (being in HR) was in a meeting with IT, and throughout the entire meeting the IT folks were like, “Yes, we believe we can do that….Yes! That will be very challenging but I think we can do that….We’ve never done that before so that will be very exciting for us to do.” They truly understood that they were serving us!

Robert Frost wrote,

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

So what are the benefits of Serving?

  • Create high level of internal and external loyalty
  • Loyal customers pay more and are easily recovered
  • Keeps our people working
  • Allows company to remain financially strong
  • Easy way to differentiate from competition
  • Opportunity to maximize pay and benefits
  • Mission becomes a reality

So what are our challenges and opportunies. How do we get from here to there? First, we must raise the bar. We must challenge ourselves. While we believe we are the best in our industry and while the numbers say that we are the best, what are we doing to improve on it? We still have a great many areas of opportunities. Second, “optionality” allows for mistakes and poor service. There should be no option. The “optionality” effect creates autonomy, breaks down internal communication, and creates a relative standardization. Third, it must become part of who we are. It must be a conviction. One way of demonstrating this is by how we answer the telephone. We don’t answer it simply by saying, “Hello,” or “Hello COMPANY NAME. This is MY NAME.” Instead we answer the phone, “Hello, this is Travis, how can I serve you?” Or, “Hello, this is Travis, how can I help you?” This has proven rather difficult for me. Twice I have dropped the ball on this: once with my boss’s boss and once with my boss. Ouch! Yet, I strongly believe and love this about my company.

Fourth, it is not just a one time event. It involves every one, every time. It’s revolutionary. And the timing is ripe! And the timing is now. We are in this recession for a reason. We have this window of opportunity to get better. Business is slow so let’s get busy with improving our serve, improving our customer-focus. Let’s identify our areas of opportunities, clean up our issues, and our faulty processes. Fifth, we must move from what is natural to what is unique and from what is unique to what is unnatural. This is a heart issue. Again, customer service and a servant’s heart must be adopted at one’s core being. It is a heart issue. If we wish to move from Good to Great, we must focus up and out. However, before we do that, we must first fix our hearts. We must choose to serve every one, every time. It is a mindset change.

Customer service is an emotion but it is also an action. It cannot simply be empathy or sympathy. It must include some sort of action, something tangible, something measurable. It must outdo process improvement. It must be bigger than process improvement, and it must drive itself.

Customer service affects everyone. It obviously affects our customers, our external customers. But it also affects our internal customers. It affects every department directly or indirectly. And it must involve everyone. Customer service must be based on agape love, love that is actionable and unconditional. Regardless of the customer’s actions, opinions, and perceptions, our customer service must be serving, gracious, and loving, not lazy, apathetic, and indifferent. It must carry a sense of urgency as though the customer was family.

Finally, our customer service must be a shining light to the entire organization, to our industry, and to all customer service persons. It must be something that everyone wants to look in on and see. Customer service is vital to our survival and we must “inspect what we expect.”

Customer Service
View more presentations from Travis Smith.
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The Fred Factor

July 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So this weekend, I read The Fred Factor by Mark Sanborn. It was a very interesting book, deductively written (he tells you what he’s going to tell you, he tells you, & then he encourages you to tell others), so you generally know what’s coming after the second chapter (so if you are pushed for time, just read the second chapter or this blog post or go to his Fred Factor website for a synopsisl; it’s basically chapter 2). However, the material was good, and unlike many deductive books I read, it was not repetitive. He taught his point expanding it each page, each chapter, and each section. Here are what Mark Sanborn calls the Fred Principles (with some subsequent quotes from Chapter 2):

  1. Everyone makes a difference.  “Nobody can prevent you from choosing to be exceptional” (9) “People give work dignity. There are no unimportant jobs, just people who feel unimportant doing their jobs” (10).
  2. Success is built on relationships. “Relationship building is the most important objective because the quality of the relationship determines the quality of the product or service” (11).
  3. You must continually create value for others (without spending any money). “Refocus their attention from being employed to being ‘emploable’” (13). “The trick is to replace money with imagination, to substitute creativity for capital…Sanborn’s Maxim says that the faster you try to solve a problem with money, the less likely it will be the best solution” (13). “There is another less observable competitor: the job we could have done. That competitor is mediocrity, a willingness to just enough and nothing more to get by. And while mediocrity will not beat you out for a job promotion or take away corporate market whare; med will just as surely diminish the quality of your performance and the meaning you derive from it” (14).
  4. You can reinvent yourself regularly. “You can make your business, as well as your life, anything you choose it to be. That’s what I call the Fred Factor” (15).

 After visualizing a few Freds at the end of the first section, in Section 2, he discusses each of these principles in more detail giving practical guides and steps to accomplish these principles (33-75). In Section 3, he writes how to Develop other Freds (76-98), and finally in Section 4, Sanborn encourages and motivates his reader to follow and spread the Fred Spirit (99-108). 

I highly encourage people that want to learn more about servant leadership and good customer service to read this book!

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