The Truth Hurts

So I purchase some nutrition bars from a prominent online store. 

If you click on 2 boxes (12 bars each), they charge you $30. 

But if you look over a little on the website page, they have 24 bars for $24. 

I contact customer service and start chatting with them about this. 

Basically, I wanted the difference refunded to me. 

Surely, not a lot of money, but more the principle of it. 

They are charging 2 different amounts for the very same thing! 

The lady on the other end of the chat asks me to forward her the link for the product. 

I comply. 

She says, “You see that link is 2 boxes for $30!”

I say, “No, that’s just the primary link to the product, and it has 2 different prices for basically the exact same thing.”

She says, “On that link you sent it has 12 bars x 2, which is different than ordering 24 bars!”

I’m thinking, Oh really!  What math class did she take in elementary school???

And then for good measure, she adds socking one to me:

“Truth Always Hurts!”

At this point, I couldn’t believe my chat “ears”.  

Aside from her “truth” not being “the truth” in any universe…

I was in shock and said something like “How dare you.  You are incredibly rude.  Put your supervisor on.”

She says: “Well, my supervisor will tell you the same thing!”

I repeated once more: “Please let me speak to a supervisor.”

Finally when I got the supervisor, who was a more normal, reasonable person, and also could do simple arithmetic, she immediately apologizes issuing me a refund. 

She asked if there was anything else she could assist with.

I asked, to confirm again, “Are you a supervisor?”

She responded affirmatively. 

I asked her to review the chat with the prior customer service rep and asked, “Is this how you want your company represented to your customers?”

Needless to say, she was flabbergasted by what she saw from their outsourced “customer service” representative.

She assured me she was flagging the chat for review by management and that this outrageous behavior from this company representative would be addressed. 

To me, it is amazing that our companies not only outsource the manufacture of our vital goods, but they also outsource customer service to people that barely seem to speak the language, can’t do basic math, and have zero customer service skills. 

This does not bode well for American competitiveness–in the age of Coronavirus or at any other time. 

I believe that this truth hurts much more than any company’s horrendous customer service. 😉

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Now Dat’s Customer Service

This was a sign that talks to a real customer service orientation:

“Suppose we refund your money.

Send you another one without charge.

Close the store.

And have the manager shot…

Would that be satisfactory?”

Actually no, that’s not good enough!

While you’re at it…

Bow down and kiss my filthy feet.

Flagellate yourself with 40 lashes using a wet noodle. 

Give me a complimentary supply of whatever the crap is I was buying for life.

And after you shoot the manager, hang him from the tallest tree for everyone to get the message.  LOL

Now dat’s customer service!  😉

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Give Me That Fridge Handle

So we got a new stainless refrigerator. 

A cause for celebration!

It get’s delivered and afterwards, I notice that the door handles are installed unevenly. 

I call the store and they agree to send their guys out to us again to fix it. 

Well, the handles were on the wrong doors and they switch it so that now they look even, but in the process, they break the handle on one of the doors so that only the top is attached to the door and the bottom is blowing in the wind (and ready to scratch the door). 

With this second installation debacle, I call the store again and not a happy camper!

Three calls later, the store agrees for me to come over and literally take the handle of the fridge on the showroom floor to replace my broken one–which I promptly did!

Third times the charm…no more broken door handle. 

As for the one in the store, let’s just say you can only open the left door for now.  😉

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Getting The Biggest Bang For The Buck

So I had the opportunity to sit in on a colleague teaching a class in Performance Improvement. 

One tool that I really liked from the class was the Impact-Effort Matrix. 

To determine project worth doing, the matrix has the:

Impacts (Vertical) – Improved customer satisfaction, quality, delivery time, etc.

Effort (Horizontal) – Money, Time, etc. 

The best bang for the buck are the projects in upper left (“Quick Wins”) that have a high impact or return for not a lot of effort. 

In contract, the projects that are the least desirable are in the lower right (“Thankless Tasks”) that have a low impact or return but come at a high cost or lot of effort. 

This is simple to do and understand and yet really helps to prioritize projects and find the best choices among them. 😉

(Source Graphic: Andy Blumenthal)

Project Management – The Best Day

So a colleague said something interesting to me about project management:

The best day of project management is usually the first day, but I want to show you that the best day is really the last day of the project.

And as I thought about this, I sort of starting laughing to myself and thinking, you know what, I think this guy has something here. 

– Day 1 of a project, everyone is usually all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. 

We’re embarking on an adventure together to build something new for the organization and our customers. 

We’re going to team up and everyone will contribute.

And out of the project sausage maker–poof!–like magic comes a new system or product. 

– But as we all know, things don’t always go so smoothly.

With some projects, the pretty smiley faces of day 1 may quickly turn to ugly frown faces.

There is analysis paralysis, scope creep, conflicting or changing priorities, resource issues, technical challenges, or the sausage just doesn’t come our right–oh sh*t!

Thus, many  projects end up going bust in terms of cost, schedule, or performance. 

That is, they end up costing too much, being delivered behind schedule, or just not meeting the performance requirements. 

You have some projects that never even truly get off the ground, have multiple resets, or get dumbed-down or even cancelled altogether along the way. 

So by the time you reach the last day of the project, many people seem like they’ve been through the project ringer. 

I’m sure that I’ve heard more than one project manager say:

Just take me out back and shoot me!

So when this colleague said that he wants the best day of the project to be the last–in terms of satisfaction with the project (not that that pain was finally over!)–I really appreciated this as an awesome goal. 

We should all look to the last day of our projects as the best–one where we can look back and say: 

Wow, great job everyone!  We really got something great done here–and we did it right!  😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Say YES!

Really liked this sign on my colleague’s desk.

It says:

Start With Yes

I remember an old boss who used to say:

Don’t make me get through no to get to yes. 

The idea as another colleague put it is to:

Keep a smile on your face and your focus on the customer; everything else takes care of itself. 

Basically, it’s all our jobs to make sure that the customer’s needs are being met. 

That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to differentiate between requirements and desirements or that we need to deliver the yacht in the first go around.

As a 4th colleague put it:

The customer is in the water. They want the yacht. But I can give them a boat. It gets them to where they want to go, and they no longer need to swim. We can work our way up to a yacht.

Good analogy analogy and good things to keep in mind for customer service excellence! 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

“Shock And Awe” Project Management

So this is a new type of project management and it can be very effective. 

It’s called (my name): 

Shock and Awe Project Management

This technique is similar to the military doctrine of shock and awe that uses speed and overwhelming power to dominate the battlefield and vanquish the enemy.

In project management too, there are often naysayers, Debbie Downers, resisters, excuse makers, and people that lay down obstacle after obstacle to progress. 

This invariably derails projects and causes them to fall behind schedule, go over budget, experience scope creep, not meet the genuine user requirements, and ultimately fail!

However, if you manage the project with “shock and awe” and set aggressive timelines, assign substantial and very good resources, and move the project full speed ahead, then you can similarly create a momentum to the project that enables it to overcome the “enemies of the progress” (i.e. those that don’t really want it to succeed or are too busying covering their own a*ses).

This approach is not advocating speed at the expense of quality nor is it calling for cutting corners or riding roughshod over people, but rather to the contrary, it calls for techniques similar to the military of moving with absolute focus, determination, efficiency, collaboration, synchronization, and overwhelming “project power” to ensure it’s success. 

Projects, like battles, can be “won” by putting the right resources on the field and moving them to get quick wins in rapid succession (where the enemies of progress don’t stand a real fight) so that the projects get not only completed on time and within budget, but most importantly to real stakeholder satisfaction and the organization’s success. 

(Source Photo: here with attribution to AlexVan)

Customer Service No-Nos

So if you’re in customer service…

The answer is easy. 

It’s always got to be YES. 

– Any less is a big No-No!

The customer’s needs are paramount.

Their satisfaction is your goal. 

So your job is to figure out how to get from no to yes!

You’ve got to problem-solve and figure it out. 

And it’s not enough to come up with any old solution.

When I said to my colleagues the other day:

“There’s a solution to every problem.”

Someone joked and answered back:

“It’s just that the customer may not like it.”

And I responded:

“Well then that’s not the solution you are looking for!”

You’ve got to go back to the drawing board and get to a legitimate yes. 

Of course, it can difficult, especially when at times you deal with some challenging customers and problems.

But listen, this is the customer service field and in the end, the customer experience should be WOW fantastic!

It’s the customer that is depending on you to come through for them and their mission. 

Doing your job isn’t just a matter of reading off of some cue card or playbook. 

This is real life with real consequences. 

If you can deliver, the customer will be able to do their jobs, and they may even sing your wildest praises–wouldn’t that be rewarding? 

Customer service means getting to YES from the earliest possible moment in the interaction, meaning it, and legitimately delivering on it–no other questions asked.  😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Survey The Performance

So I was in the Apple store recently and made a purchase to upgrade some technology.

Afterwards, I got an email asking:

“How was your experience with Beverly?

When I opened this my wife saw this and was like, “What the heck is that?!”

We should be surveying the work performance and not the experience with the person.

I can’t imagine that super smart Apple didn’t see this sort of double entendre about sweet Beverly.

All Apple needed to do was add in the word(s) at the top, shopping and/or at Apple, as in “How was your shopping experience with Beverly at Apple? (rather than burying it in the subtext later)”

But then their customer satisfaction survey maybe wouldn’t get as much attention.

Sexualizing the customer experience shouldn’t be part of marketing, unless maybe your purposely visiting a shady part of town for unscrupulous reasons. 

Anyway, I did respond that Beverly was a definite 5!

Thank you for the wonderful technology Apple and for the experience with Beverly–it was great! 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

>Customer Service Design

>

I really liked the article in MIT Sloan Management Review (Fall 2010) called “Designing the Soft Side of Customer Service” by Dasu and Chase.

The authors write: “Even in the most mundane [customer] encounters, emotions are lurking under the surface. Your job is to make those feelings positive.”

Wow! That is a pretty powerful statement.

Think about it. How often do you genuinely deliver on that positive experience for your customers versus how often do they come away feeling slighted, taken advantage of, maybe even cheated of the service they know they deserve.

Sometimes of course, there are justifiable reasons why we can’t make a customer happy—maybe the customer is simply being unreasonable or is a knucklehead or maybe even some sort of nutcase. We have to use good judgment when it comes to this.

But often there are other problems that are getting in the way of us delivering on that positive customer experience:

Problem #1: We get caught up in the policies, processes, personalities, and politics of a situation, rather than focusing on the customer and their satisfaction. We forget who our real customers are.

Problem #2: We don’t think like the customer. We don’t genuinely listen to the customer or try to understand where they are coming from or what they even want. We are too busy talking the “company line,” playing defense, or taking an adversarial role. We don’t put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, not even for a minute.

Problem #3: We often don’t put the customer first; we put ourselves first. We are more concerned with not making a mistake, getting into trouble, or maybe don’t want to even work “that hard.” In general, we should, but don’t go the extra mile for the customer, let along deliver on first mile.

The MIT article tells us that we can improve customer experiences by designing-in how we manage the customer’s emotions, trust, and need for control (ETCs), as follows:

• Emotions—have empathy for customers and generate thoughtful interactions that limit negative customer emotions and accentuate positive ones, so that the customer comes away feeling joy, thrill, happiness rather than anger, anxiety and stress.
• Trust—provide consistent performance, a high-level of engagement and follow-up, and clear and open communication. These contribute to building an enduring relationship.
• Control—provide customers with ample information, so they feel “cognitive control” over what is happening to them, and provide customers with the ability to make significant service delivery decisions, so they experience “behavioral control.”

Designing for positive customer ETCs experiences will go a long way to resolving the problems of poor customer service, where we know and stay focused on who our customers are, can think as they do, and seriously deliver on their needs the way you would want your customer needs addressed.

I suppose if I have to sum it up in a couple of words, it’s about being professionally selfless and not selfish in all our customer interactions.

It takes some maturity to get there, but I think it’s why we are here to serve.