Some Service Is in Need of Common Sense
For a company eager to demonstrate its commitment to customer service, it was a small but significant lapse. Some customers who tried to get the 15% senior citizen discount advertised in the window of their local Jack in the Box couldn’t get it without a special ID card and couldn’t get a card because the branch had no more.
Some couldn’t even work the toll-free customer service hot line posted on the restaurant wall. They were understandably befuddled by recorded instructions to press the pound sign, then the number 2, then 9 for yes or 6 for no (what was the question?).
Promising customer service is common these days, customer service being the “new hot button” in the business world, says Madalyn Duerr, director of the Chicago-based International Customer Service Assn. The service promised should be delivered, however--a point that comes up from time to time in the many books, articles, seminars, classes and conferences now available, all guiding businesses toward quality service, service first, total customer service, a service edge, or (in the words of one consultant) “making it happen at the customer level,” whatever that means.
Customer service has been in the news since the early 1980s, when people began noting its absence--an effect, they said, of the cost-cutting, recession-prone 1970s and the concomitant growth of computerization, which was used to replace, instead of aid, human workers. At the same time, a few companies had discerned and were catering to a demand for good service, often from baby boomer yuppies who had the consumerist consciousness of the 1960s accompanied by 1980s money.
Those companies associated with high levels of service--Nordstrom, L. L. Bean, American Express and others--began to get a lot of breathy press for being wonderful, if not always as wonderful as the press continued to report, mostly on the basis of company interviews. And because they prospered, customer service was suddenly considered not a gift to customers, but a “marketplace distinguisher,” a “profit strategy,” an “ultimate weapon,” and therefore acceptable.
There was also a lot of attention accorded a study of customer service and complaint handling done for Virginia Knauer’s consumer affairs office in the White House by TARP, a Washington-based consulting group then known as the Technical Assistance Research Programs Institute. From this study, published in 1979 and updated in 1986, came the persuasive information that 95% of disgruntled customers switched their business, never bothering to file complaints, and that it costs business five times as much to get new customers as to keep old ones.
Thus, “in the last couple of years, there’s been a recognition,” says Duerr, “that customer service is not a little complaint department in the back of the store. It’s everything. And it has to be a total company mind-set, a strategy from the CEO on down.”
As strategies go, it’s really pretty simple stuff, kindergarten fare, the golden rule. It doesn’t even take a business background. Pick a mother, any mother, take mine, who says: “Business should treat customers with deference because they pay for it. There’s a lot of competition, so business must entice people to buy, then treat them well to retain them.”
The philosophy applies to any business, whether “the service itself is what’s being sold, or whether the service supports the sale of goods,” says Leonard Berry, professor of marketing at Texas A&M; in College Station, Tex., and co-author of the forthcoming book “Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Expectations and Perceptions.” Only the phrasing varies, whether it’s Berry’s definition of service as “meeting or exceeding the customer’s expectations,” or TARP’s line, phrased by its chairman, Marc Grainer: “Doing it right the first time and effective complaint management equal maximum customer satisfaction/brand loyalty.”
For companies considering customer service for the first time, today’s experts can provide new perceptions. According to their customers, some, says Berry, are failing to provide the most basic service, which is “keeping their implicit and explicit promise to do what they’re supposed to do--to pay claims if they’re an insurance company, to have clean secure rooms, if they’re a hotel, to take off on time and get there if they’re an airline.”
Customers, say all the experts, may further expect service to include efficiency, courtesy, sympathy, amends and even apologies when something goes wrong.
Some may need to be told that the word service also suggests to most people “some variation of personal attention, responsiveness, politeness of employees,” says Ron Zemke in “The Service Edge.”
Some may need a little realism. Grainer suggests that complaints demand not just individual solutions but general analysis so that “the root problem” doesn’t continue and that firms blaming product problems on “customer misuse” are probably providing “poor customer education.”
Customer service experts usually offer business an organized approach to bettering their service, often prescribing similar steps: define philosophy, set service standards, involve everyone, train and reward employees, track performance. Variation is mostly semantic.
One offers six “operating principles,” from listening to customers to rewarding accomplishment. Another has a “six-point plan,” from setting strategy to keeping track. Another uses a cute acronym that spells out “I’M FIRST” as it moves from Integration to Training.
All offer specific tips to both the initiate and the seasoned. Hotels, says Zemke, get more useful information by asking guests a “carefully crafted series of questions” on the speed, accuracy and responsiveness of the front desk than by asking “How was the treatment?” Similarly, says Grainer, an 800 number is more effective if it “lets you ventilate your anger” rather than just taking name, address and so forth in a set order.
Much of the professional advice, though unarguable, seems just common sense. But then, says Berry, “much of good service is common sense. The reason so much service is mediocre is that common sense isn’t very common.”
