Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (5 page)

What if you
do
need to screen your calls? (Maybe you’re CEO Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com, and potential vendors won’t give you a moment’s peace, even though you’re the wrong person for them to speak with.) At least create a discreet call-screening protocol that protects the feelings of callers:

Bad Screen:
‘‘Who’s calling?’’ (Whether or not this is followed by a grudging ‘‘please.’’) ‘‘Does he know why you are calling?’’ ‘‘Who are you with?’’ ‘‘What is the nature and purpose of your call?’’

Good Screen:
‘‘Absolutely. May I tell Mr. Bezos who is calling?’’

(In reality, the caller won’t necessarily get Jeff. But hackles aren’t raised; feelings are spared. There’s no feeling of a test that must be passed—even if, in fact, there is.)

We, by the way, put our mouths where our mouths are, so to speak.

Leonardo and Micah—as well as the best bosses we’ve had in our own careers—are non-phone-screeners. And historically, many titans of industry, up to and including Sam Walton, have been famously accessible on the phone. (We do figure Sam did a few backflips in his grave when Walmart announced years later that online customers were to be banned from even basic 800 telephone support as part of an official Walmart

‘‘Customer Contact Reduction’’
program.)4

?
To ‘‘give good phone,’’ you’ve got to pick it up!
While you’re busy getting your words just right, you also need to set the stage Language Engineering

23

correctly. Answer the phone in the right number of rings: One or two rings is best, and try to never wait more than three rings.

Here’s why: After three rings, which is roughly twelve seconds, callers become anxious. After five or six rings, they become frustrated.

After eight or nine, quite irritated. After eleven or twelve, they will of course become angry or alarmed, and will hang up. Explain these reasons to your staff, and they will be more apt to support the no-more-than-three-rings policy because they’ll understand how much it reduces client anxiety.

In cyberspace, there are analogs to answering your phone promptly.

The following may sound obvious, but bear with us, because we see ugly surprises in this area all the time. Do you know for sure that the

‘‘request for info’’ forms on your website actually get where they’re going once a customer fills them out? And, if so, whether they’re answered quickly? You may be surprised to learn that because of a scripting error they never end up anywhere. Or, almost as bad, that they are delayed at some point in your processes and responded to
en masse
days later—which is a completely unacceptable interval on the Web. These service failures are invisible at the time, but they will ultimately show up in the form of stalled company growth.

Your technical team can help with elaborate and ‘‘statistically valid’’

testing systems to prevent these problems, which is very important. But please
supplement
these with a simple reality check any time you get that unsettled feeling inside: Try everything out yourself, as if you were a prospect or a customer. Do this repeatedly, and take nothing for granted. This ‘‘trust no one’’ technique puts you in the tiny minority who actually know that their systems work from their customers’ perspective.

?
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re human (so go out
of your way to prove it).
Many businesses use Internet tricks as a way to give themselves a phony patina of personalization. As a result, even live customer service staffers attempting to engage online customers one on one may be met with inordinate suspicion. There are ways to turn 24

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

these negative expectations to your advantage—by flipping them on their heads in a very visible manner. Here are a few examples:

?
If you send out any mass electronic messages, build in a
way for customers to immediately reach a real person.
If you are one of the 60,000 people who has asked to receive an automated business email ‘‘from Micah Solomon’’ each month, try
responding
to one of the messages. Who gets right back to you? The
real
Micah. (See the sidebar for Micah’s explanation of how he can do this and still get his other work done each day.) Compare this to the many online merchants whose mass email communications begin or end with something like:

‘‘Please do not reply to this message.’’

To customers, that sounds a lot like:

‘‘Hush now, customer: Don’t distract us while we we’re busy counting the
money you paid us!’’

It doesn’t matter how competent, efficient, or technically ‘‘correct’’

your correspondence system is; if it makes you seem cold or robotic, your relationship with the customer will falter.

?
If your website features ‘‘live chat,’’ make it clear you’re
staffing it with very real and personable human beings.
Even if you’ve manned Web chat lines with your very best, most expert staffers, users will devalue the service if you withhold full names. Not even your most personable, endearing employee is going to build enduring bonds for you online by typing, ‘‘Hi! This is Jane at Company X.’’ Web visitors will assume that ‘‘Jane’’ is a corporate drone—or even a computer program!—sending canned advice out to customers she/it has no interest in hearing from again. This skepticism isn’t
your
Jane’s fault. It’s the fault of all the artificial Janes before her. But it’s easily remedied by calling her who she is:
Jane Chang-Katzenberg.

?
Before anybody hits ‘‘send,’’ make sure each email starts
out on the right foot.
You would never begin a printed letter without some kind of salutation (‘‘Dear,’’ ‘‘Hi,’’ etc.). So don’t forget the salutation in an email. Even ‘‘Yo Mark!’’ (depending on the formality of your business and relationship, obviously) is better than starting cold with Language Engineering

25

just a name (‘‘Mark—’’), we’d argue. Try out this simple rule, and you’ll start to feel your Internet relationships warm up.

Adding a Real Human Touch to a Mass Email Takes

Less Time Than You’d Think

With a customer email list of 60,000, can you really find the time to answer replies from anyone who asks for you personally?

Micah does so. He finds it less daunting than it sounds, and suggests you try it too. He explains:

‘‘Most customers who’ve asked to receive a monthly informational or sales email from me don’t actually feel a need to communicate one on one with me. So, if they respond it’s by clicking on the automated link they were intended to click on (for whatever this month’s offer is, for example). If someone’s aggravated with our service, however, or someone wants to pitch his kid’s Little League jersey sponsorship to me, I feel they ought to be able to get directly to me, right away, without going through any hoops. Because hopefully I can make sure we take care of the problem, or find someone who can, pronto. That’s why I make sure that hitting ‘‘reply’’ or clicking on the ‘‘Micah’’ link sends a message directly to me.

‘ That’s not very much to ask of my time. Only a few people use the option, and it’s not difficult to set up—no matter what your Internet provider is telling you.’’

CHAPTER FOUR

Recovery!

Turning Service Failures Around

Breakdowns in service are unavoidable. An ice storm forces you to miss a customer’s shipping deadline. A waiter drops a tray in a customer’s lap. A computer system goes down. A key person walks out on you with no notice—on the only day you couldn’t possibly arrange cov-erage.

All of this, potentially, is good news.

Service breakdowns are uncomfortable, and they require training to resolve. But you’ll find an opportunity hidden inside your company’s worst moments: the opportunity to bring a customer closer to you.

Indeed, you can learn to handle service breakdowns so masterfully that they actually help you to create loyal customers. Our method is outlined below.

The Italian Mama Method

The archetype of an adoring Italian mother is the spirit behind our approach to service recovery. Picture a doting parent after a toddler takes a tumble:

26

Recovery

27

Oh, my darling, look at what happened! Oh, you skinned

your knee on that walkway, my bambino; let me kiss that terrible wound. Shall we watch a little TV? And here’s a lollipop for you while I bandage you up!

Minus the baby talk, this is pretty much how we recommend you react to service failures.

Does this style of response feel unfamiliar? That’s understandable, since most service encounters seem to be based instead on what you might call the Courtroom Method:

Let’s sort out the facts of the situation. What was the angle of the concrete in the sidewalk at time of impact, and were you wearing proper protective clothing per the user’s manual at the time your knee impacted the concrete? And I need to ask, young man: Were you exceeding the sidewalk speed

limit?

The Four Steps to Great Service Recoveries

Reacting like trial lawyers is a hard habit for service providers to break.

To get your staff out of the courtroom rut and ensure they don’t lapse back into it, respond to each service failure with a specific stepwise sequence:

1. Apologize and ask for forgiveness.

2. Review the complaint with your customer.

3. Fix the problem and then follow up: Either fix the issue in the next twenty minutes or follow up within twenty minutes to check on the customer and explain the progress you have made.

Follow up
after
fixing things as well, to show continuing concern and appreciation.

28

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

4. Document the problem in detail to allow you to permanently fix the defect by identifying trends.

Let’s run through these steps in detail.

Step 1: Apologize and Ask for Forgiveness.
What’s needed is a sincere, personal, non-mechanical apology. There are many creative and sensitive ways to convey that you recognize and regret what your customer has been through.

What does a customer want out of an apology? He wants to be listened to, closely. He wants to know you’re genuinely sorry. He wants to know you think he’s right, at least in
some
sense. He wants to know you are taking his input seriously.

Overall, he wants to feel important to you.

This means that the key to an effective apology, to getting back on the right foot with your customer, is to convey at the outset that you are going to take his side and share his viewpoint.

Preemptively Unwad Your Staff’s Shorts

When your own employees first hear you taking the customer’s side, don’t expect them to be thrilled. (‘‘Does my boss blame me?

Does she actually believe that idiot’s version of what happened?’’) You need to explain that it’s often necessary to empathize with and even amplify the customer’s side of the story. Explain that the customer may or may not be right in an objective sense.

Regardless, you’re going to be disproportionately sympathetic to the customer’s viewpoint because the customer is
your
boss—the customer pays
your
paycheck, along with the paychecks of everyone else in the company.

Human nature being what it is, this explanation will bear repeating. Often.

Recovery

29

Pay close attention to
how
you apologize, because apologies that come off as insincere will alienate customers. If you’re like the rest of us, you’ll sometimes feel an urge to earnestly
pretend
you’re apologizing, when you’re in fact mounting a canny defense argument. Learn to sniff out fake apologies—your own and your staff ’s—in order to protect your relationships with customers.

Fake apologies can be very sneaky. Some don’t reveal themselves as fakes until you have time to think them through carefully. For example, consider the apparently simple sentence ‘‘Please accept my apology.’’ If that sentence is offered in a rushed, impersonal manner, it will come across as an order:
‘‘Accept my apology already so we can wrap this up. We
need to move on here!’’

Here is another great example of a sneaky fake apology: ‘‘
If what you
say is correct, I certainly apologize
.’’ (Translation: You, dear customer, are a liar.)

This one doesn’t count, either:
‘‘I’m sorry to hear that. We have wonderful receptionists. So I’m surprised to hear that you’re unhappy.’’
(Translation: ‘‘
If you can’t get along with
her
, you can’t get along with anyone.’’)
One key to an effective apology is to
stretch the apology out,
extending it until the customer begins to really connect with you. Stretching out an apology feels awkward at first, and it’s hard for staff to do. In part this is because service providers tend to be action-oriented: They naturally want to dive in and fix things right away. It’s good to be practical, of course, but service recovery is not just a no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts process. Service recovery is an emotional and personal moment in a relationship. To connect with customers emotionally, slow apologies down.

Slowing down apologies gets easier with practice, and the technique’s payoff is worth the investment: Gradually, the customer’s anger will start to give way to goodwill. When an unrushed apology has finally defused a customer’s anger, she will spontaneously signal that she is beginning to feel allied with you by saying something like ‘‘I understand that it’s not personally your fault.’’ This improvement in tone tells you that you’re ready for Step 2.

30

Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit

Step 2: Go Over the Complaint with Your Customer.
In Step 1, you’ve begun an alliance with your customer; in Step 2, those collaborative feelings will let you explore what she needs for a good outcome.

Fully exploring the customer’s issue often requires you to ask rudi-mentary questions—even ones that can feel insulting to a customer, like