Thoughts on Customer Service

Three weeks into my new job and I get my first complaint by a senior person (my boss to be exact) about IT service. Without getting into too many technical details, he is out of town and can't connect into our secure sites. New laptop, VPN not working.  Follow that up with an email issue and he's one unhappy camper.

Now things happen, and everybody knows that. But what it made me think of was customer service and how we respond when a customer reports to us that something went wrong. One of the things that happens in IT service is that we tend to go to "user error" right away. You know, we even have jokes and cartoons about it. You've seen them "PEBKAC" - problem exists between keyboard and chair. And often our first response is to ask the user "did you do this?", which makes them feel like we're thinking "PEBKAC". 

A couple of years ago, my daughter got a summer job at a fast food restaurant. While I wouldn't say they gave her great customer service training, they sent her home with the corporate customer service materials and I have to say they were amazing. I was simply blown away.  I won't name the fast food restaurant (although I will say that Jon Stewart makes fun of them on the Daily Show a lot), nor will I repeat their philosophy, but let me just say that the first two words in it were "believe" and "listen".  Simple. Brilliant. Think about it.  Believe and listen. If we started every customer support conversation with just believing and then listening, we could fundamentally change the tone of the conversation and thus the experience of the user. 

When I was early in my career, I remember having a conversation with a customer where she described something that went wrong in a program I had written. I didn't believe her, I thought it must have been something she was doing wrong, and I told her so. (I said I was young!). She proceeded to run the program and show me what it was doing, and of course she was right. After that, I never said "you're wrong" out loud to a customer, but when I've worked in customer support, I'll admit that I've often begun the conversation thinking just that, it must be something the user is doing wrong. Then instead of listening to find the cause of the problem, I was listening to hear what they were doing wrong. I simply wasn't believing that there was a problem.  Over the years, I've learned to listen to understand, and in fact I'm very proud of my customer service skills. But the fast food company got it right and made it simple by telling their staff just to believe the customer. It's sort of like that old adage "the customer is always right". In fact, we all know, the customer is not always right.  But isn't it better to start thinking they're right and learning they're wrong rather than starting thinking they're wrong only to learn they were right all along, just like I did when I was young?

So give it a try - make a fundamental shift to really believing the customer from the beginning of the conversation. Couple that with really listening, and your customers will love you.