To understand the value of “venting”, peek at Customer Service. This can be any organization’s customer service. If your organization serves the public in any way, you have some variety of customer service. You may sell a product or provide a service. The product or service is either for the customer’s job or the customer’s private use. If that “customer” must call into your customer service for any reason:
- Price
- Specifications
- How to use
- Whatever
…And something goes bad, you and your company have a BIG problem. The worst part of bad customer service is that it lasts much longer than a few moments. Bad customer service makes a lasting impression.
Here is an example of what I mean. Several years ago, I worked for a company making PC “boxes”. These are the enclosures (large and small) you see wrapped around the outside of your computer, or any of the other gadgets. Our principal customers were volume buyers—big corporations or custom resellers. Sometimes, however, we sold a box (or a few) to individuals or small companies. My company had a service counter where these people, could pick up orders they had phoned in to our sales representatives.
Sounds simple doesn’t it. Trust me, it was not simple and here is why. The manager of the service counter (we called it “the front desk”) had a bad attitude about life in general and treated some of the smaller customers shabbily. Because of this shabby treatment, top management began to receive hundreds of complaints. What could management do about this?
One solution to the problem (after learning about the complaints)
was to install a “suggestion box” right there in the lobby
of the “front desk”.
I must confess many of us
thought this to be humorous. Who would take the time to write about
shabby treatment?
More to the point, who would complain knowing they were complaining
to the person
giving them shabby treatment?
Guess what? That “suggestion box” in the lobby would fill to overflowing when we had a busy week. That was a huge surprise! Our Human Resources Director had the key to that “suggestion box“. On Monday mornings, she would come out to the lobby, open the lock on the box, and take the pile of papers into her office for review.
While I do NOT agree with what our HR Director did next, the wheels began to fall off the front desk manager’s wagon after a few weeks. Our HR Director began inviting the front desk manager in for “heart-to-heart” talks every Monday afternoon after studying the written comments in the box. Nine out of ten of these written comments were complaints from discontented customers!
Here are just some of the complaints:
The enclosures did not fit what they should fit.
Or, the accessories failed inside the box.
Or, the connectors were wrong.
And on and on.
The sad part is that when these customers tried to call our company
to resolve their
problems, they had to deal with that same front desk manager again.
Most of complaints concerned this front desk manager. He was rude and
defensive.
He blamed the sales rep who took the order.
Or, he blamed the people who stuffed the peripherals into our boxes.
Or, he (mostly) blamed the customers for ordering the wrong product.
Or, it was simply NOT his fault.
He suggested that our management install cameras in the lobby to
discover who was
writing all of these idiotic complaints. We chuckled at that. We knew
it was a whole
bunch of nameless customers yelling about lousy service.
Management’s “solution” was twofold:
- First, they fired the service manager;
- Then, they junked the “suggestion box”
That stopped the
written complaints immediately.
Management just went blithely on with what they were doing. Nobody
wanted to correct
the customers’ service problems. That was too bad because it
wasn’t
long before the
company’s doors closed forever.
Here is the moral to this story. The people in customer service could have been trained to manage each complaint with professionalism and tact. Management did not provide the training and the result was a disaster.
Here is my solution to the problem. That is to design a carefully crafted spot on the organization’s website to allow complaints for whatever reason. Allow a third-party organization to handle each complaint to preserve the anonymity of the complainer. This allows a complainer to “vent” about whatever the problem may be.
Let us get practical here…How can we do this? Think about the “box” house I mentioned above. Each order arrived with paperwork about price, tax, shipping, and the like.
1. We could have added a message about quality.
2. We could have told the customer—in writing—that we cared.
3. We could have told the customer how to tell us about a problem.
4. We could have told the customer who to call with any problem.
5. We could have told the customer what we would do about it.
6. We did NOT do any of that and our “box” company went
out of business.
Here’s a parallel experience. We know you have access to the
Web because you’re
reading this. Take a look at YouTube. You
will see nasty comments about this or that
signed by somebody with the name of “hardman8th” (or something
like that). The writer
wants to express his (her) opinion about some felt wrong. Most of the
time, these
comments don’t even make sense because you (the reader) don’t
have a clue about the real problem.
One wonders what that same message might be like if the commenter’s
name was signed
as “Al Smith, 123 Main St., Dallas, TX” with a driver’s
license photo attached. The
anonymity of YouTube allows most of these
caustic attacks with relative impunity. The
writers can be as aggressive as they like because they know the person
next to them in the
check-out line at Wal«Mart won’t say:
“WOW! That was some nasty comment you made on YouTube about
(this or that)”.
Think about this for a moment. Can’t you just see the result of that confrontation!
Now, as strange as it may seem, I propose to launch a test bed of exactly this idea. Instead of recruiting a focus group of friends, neighbors, or work-related people, have a focus group of NAMELESS people. Ask these NAMELESS people what they think about your organization’s customer service. I would do this as the disinterested third-party so you will not get all upset because of your ever-defensive: “He called MY baby ugly” view.
I do not want you to take comments as personal slaps in the face. We are here to learn the truth about your customer service.
Here is an added bonus to the deal. As the project gains some impetus, you allow your customer service personnel to say what they will to improve the service with the same anonymity as the NAMELESS people. Why do this? Because your service personnel are not likely to sit in the next Monday morning staff meeting and tell anybody about customer service problems. This is especially true if they think management is part of the problem. It is a certainty they will not do that if they wish to keep their jobs. Oh, the managers may say it’s okay to “vent”, but once the “venting” employee makes the comment, the damage is done.
You simply cannot “unring a bell”. The comfort level is
gone forever and, sadly,
customer service suffers.
Honestly,
Katie Campbell
Design Concepts Technology, Inc.
01/05/08
