9. The Communication of Caring

While waiting in a restaurant for a client with whom I had a dinner date, I noticed several signs touting the importance of customer service to the establishment. Clearly, this restaurant valued good service, and I looked forward to having dinner in a place that cared about its customers.

My client arrived promptly for our reservation but, although the restaurant was only half full, we waited a long time to be seated and even longer to be given menus. Then the waiter hovered over us, overly eager to take our orders. After he brought our dinners, he repeatedly interrupted us to find out if everything was okay, which it was—except for his interruptions. Lingering over coffee, we suffered only one more interruption: presentation of the bill, which—guess what?—had a sizable error in it. As we paid the corrected bill and got ready to leave the restaurant, the maître d’ smiled pleasantly and said he hoped we’d return soon. Not likely.

Beware: Neither saying that you care about customer service nor posting signs in every nook and cranny will convince customers that you mean it if they experience something to the contrary. If your service is shabby, displaying such signs will only widen the gap between service as promised and service as delivered. It’s what you do that customers notice, not what you claim to do.

It’s often said that customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. This sounds clever, but it’s not quite true. What matters is not how much you care, but how skillfully you exhibit evidence of caring. How deeply you care matters little to customers if you ignore their calls, discount their views, treat them rudely—or serve them Glitch du Jour, as my client and I experienced in the restaurant. If you deliver poor service, customers don’t want to hear that you care, because it’s clear to them you don’t!

As the IT customers in one company I consulted with some years ago know well, visible declarations of caring sometimes signal just the opposite. To reverse an extended period of network outages, application failures, and flawed technical support, the IT division established a new goal: Deliver world-class service. To emphasize this goal, management had it printed as a slogan on IT business cards and posted on plaques and posters throughout the division. What a laugh customers had. World-class service, indeed! Customers weren’t even getting neighborhood-class service.

This disparity between expressions of caring and actions that suggest otherwise—that is, between service as promised and service as delivered—reflects a prevalent communication gap. The more the struggling IT division touted how excellent its service would be in the future, the more its customers’ attention was riveted on the inferior service they were receiving then, at that minute.

If you want to successfully communicate that you care, consider the strategies and recommendations presented in this chapter.

I’ve collected feedback from many hundreds of technical and business professionals about what matters to them as customers. About 15 percent of their responses focus on what I refer to as product expectations. These are what customers expect about particular attributes of the product or solution, such as reliability, functionality, price, value, and quality.

The majority of their responses—approximately 85 percent—concern process expectations: the very human matter of how they want to be treated. And here’s a key point: The majority of process expectations are communication-related. For example, customers want to be treated with respect, friendliness, and honesty. They want the basic courtesies. They want to be listened to—not ignored, interrupted, or spoken to as if they were dummies. They want to be informed of their options and consulted about matters that concern them. How providers respond to these process expectations significantly influences customer satisfaction.

Process expectations may vary from one situation or time to another, but everyone has some process expectations that, if not met, will result in a dissatisfying experience. Even when all else seems to be in order, ignoring your customers’ process expectations can lead to their dissatisfaction. That was Pete’s experience, as we saw in Chapter 3. Despite an on-time delivery of the required solution, Pete’s client Carl was dissatisfied because he never knew the status of the project while it was in progress. This information was important to him, and not having it was sufficient, in his mind, to undermine his impression of an otherwise successful project.

Granted, in certain circumstances, customers may willingly tolerate being treated in an obnoxious manner. A manager once commented to me that one software product his group had purchased was so superior that “we’re willing to put up with a certain amount of crap from the vendor.” But in such a relationship, it may take no more than a slight slip in product quality—or the customer just plain getting tired of being treated so poorly—for the customer to pull the plug and take business to a vendor that treats its customers better.

Conversely, most of us, as customers, have taken our business elsewhere precisely because of dissatisfaction with how we were treated. The product and the price may have been just right, but something about our service experience displeased us and so we took our business elsewhere. However, it’s not just customers at the consumer level who take this type of action, but dissatisfied customers at all levels. An IT vice president who was making a mega-hundred-thousand-dollar purchasing decision told me: “Vendor A has a superb product at a good price, and I know I should go with it. But I just don’t like the way the company is treating us, so we’re going to go with Vendor B.” Could Vendor A be you?

Rudeness, disrespect, a dismissive attitude, and a failure to return calls may seem like minor matters until they add up to equal angry, complaining customers. Richard Whiteley reports in The Customer-Driven Company that research conducted by The Forum Corporation revealed that nearly 70 percent of the identifiable reasons customers left typical companies had to do not with the product, but with poor service quality—in particular, a lack of personal attention and a manner of service that was rude, unhelpful, and otherwise unsatisfactory.¹

¹ Richard C. Whiteley, The Customer-Driven Company: Moving from Talk to Action (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991), pp. 9–10.

Even when you’re unaware of it, your demeanor communicates a message to customers that affects their overall satisfaction and influences how readily they’ll forgive and forget any slipups. I recall being quick to dismiss Ms. Friendly Face’s goofs as no big deal, but I felt annoyed when her replacement made even trivial mistakes.

This emotional component plays an important part in the psychology of customer service: Customers who are pleased with whatever aspect of their service experience is important to them will tend to respond favorably to other aspects that might otherwise have disturbed them. Conversely, once customers become displeased, they tend to find fault with other service components, not just with the aspects they initially viewed as important. As for me, I actually began to feel glum and gloomy whenever I went into the print shop.

In an editorial published in the monthly magazine Customer Support Management, editor Kathy Grayson described her positive experience in reaching a human being at one airline’s customer-service area—this contrasted sharply with all the other airlines’ automated telephone response systems, which seemed to condemn her to a life of “press this, press that.” She commented that she’d call this airline first for her next trip, reasoning that if the airline “cares more about me on the phone, they may care more about me in the plane.”²

² Kathy Grayson, “Live! From the Call Center . . .” Customer Support Management (July/August, 1999), p. 10.

As Grayson admits, “My reaction may not be logical. . . .” Yet, her reaction is not unique; the seemingly small things—your smile, your friendly tone of voice, and your caring attitude—often have an impact that’s powerful enough to outweigh inadequacies, flubs, and blunders. Numerous people I interviewed in one particular company’s customer division confirmed this point when they commented about an IT liaison who didn’t always have the information they wanted but who was so friendly and upbeat that they didn’t mind. Once customers have had some contact with you, your demeanor and attitude enter the room before you and influence the response you get.

These ideas hold true when you’re on the customer side of the relationship as well. Starting out with a smile, a friendly voice, and an upbeat attitude will get you service that’s faster, of higher quality, and more attentive than if you enter fighting. Providers’ process expectations, it seems, are remarkably similar to those of customers.

• What will you be looking for when we’ve completed this project so that you feel it’s been successful?

• How would you like us to keep in touch with you as we deliver this service?

• What’s important to you in the way we work with you in solving this problem?

• What is the most important aspect of this work for you?

• What have you experienced in past projects that pleased you?

• What have you experienced in past projects that concerned or disappointed you?

• What aspects of this project are so new or unfamiliar that they worry you?

You may find that what customers describe as most important to them differs from what you perceived to be most important. Keep in mind that most customers are unaccustomed to answering questions such as these and may need time to reflect on them before responding. Once you have identified their process expectations, it’s worth reevaluating them periodically since responses may vary over the course of a project or relationship.

As you investigate your customers’ process expectations, you may encounter important differences between customers who, at first glance, seem to want the same thing. For example, in a meeting with two client groups, a software team learned that it was very important to both client managers to be updated on the progress of their respective projects. However, each manager had a different preference for this reporting. One client manager emphasized that she wanted a weekly report. The other responded rapidly, “I don’t have time for weekly reports. I just want to be told of any deviations from what we’ve agreed to. I’ll assume that the project is on track unless you tell me otherwise.”

Giving both managers the same kind of report would have left one of them unhappy. Discovering customers’ preferences at the start allows you to take such differences into account—or for a compromise arrangement to be made if addressing individual preferences would be impractical.

Not surprisingly, these grievances are interrelated: Customers who can’t get status updates for information they want feel as if they’re being made to wait needlessly and view their provider as treating them dishonestly. Taken together, these grievances reflect gaps between how customers want to be treated and how they feel they’re being treated. Given the prevalence of these Universal Grievances, they’re worth paying attention to even if your customers haven’t specifically cited them as being important. Let’s look at how these grievances play out, and how to avoid them.

Exasperated is how I felt the time we had a plumbing problem, and the plumber who came to the house told us that we needed a part that he didn’t have in stock. He said he’d make some calls and let us know when he located the part. Then off he went. After several hours, I wondered whether I should call him to check on his progress. I didn’t want to annoy him if he was searching for the part, but I worried that if I waited and he wasn’t even looking, I’d never get the problem fixed. Not hearing from him left me feeling uncertain, exasperated, and anxious. I concluded that if he needed to be nudged, I didn’t want to wait too long to do the nudging.

Relieving customer uncertainty rarely requires a Herculean effort but it does take sensitivity to meeting the expectations of others. While writing this chapter, I got a phone call from a colleague who was due shortly for a meeting and who wanted to let me know she’d been delayed. Offering this kind of information—“just wanted to let you know”—relieves uncertainty and eliminates a communication gap before one can even occur. It’s simple courtesy with a big impact.

Unfortunately, my plumber didn’t seem to know that providing a progress report goes a long way toward keeping a customer satisfied. After another round of waiting and wondering whether I should call him, I did the only thing I could think of: I told my husband to call him! And yes, the plumber was indeed searching for the part. But he was doing something more. He was contributing mightily to a Universal Grievance: the frustration of not being kept informed about a matter of importance.

If you’ve made a commitment to customers to perform a task or fix a problem, but they can’t see or hear that you’re performing as promised, many will conclude that you’re not. If you’ve already built a strong foundation with them, they’re likely to give you the benefit of the doubt at times when you cannot meet their expectations. Communicating about status is especially needed during times of stress—and the very fact of not knowing the status will, for some, create that stress. A finance manager put it succinctly when he described the uncertainty he had regarding his company’s IT organization, “It’s not their ability to fix the problem that concerns us; it’s their ability to communicate during the fix process.”

Of course, customers have responsibilities, too. In retrospect, I could have asked the plumber when he’d be likely to call—and saved myself a few hours of futile fussing. I could also have asked him whether it would be all right to call him in a couple of hours to see how he was faring in locating the part. All of us, as customers, are likely to receive better service if we take some responsibility for receiving the kind of service we want.

³ Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg, Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), p. 109.

To establish trust, however, you can’t just declare, “I’m dependable. Trust me on this.” In The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action, author Wendy Northcutt is right on the mark in pointing out, “Most of us know instinctively that the phrase ‘trust me, light this fuse’ is a recipe for disaster.”⁴

⁴ Wendy Northcutt, The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action (New York: Dutton, 2000), p. 1.

Clearly, you have to develop a reputation for delivering on your commitments, and the best way to do that is to deliver on your commitments. But here is a critical point if you’re serious about building trust: If you determine you won’t be able to deliver as promised, you must let your customers know in a timely manner. Doing so can actually strengthen trust because you’ll have been open and forthcoming. Conversely, in the absence of trust, the longer customers are forced to wait for an explanation, the more upset they become. This is a perfectly reasonable customer response.

The worst-case scenario for customers occurs when they feel powerless to find out the status. In this situation, they are likely to also become dissatisfied with other flaws in service delivery that otherwise might not bother them. Many stories from the world of customer service show that customers who become dissatisfied with one valued aspect of service will tend to find fault with others as well.

According to a New York Times article, “When shoppers receive bad service online, they are not only less likely to revisit the retailer’s Web Site, they may also spend fewer dollars at its off-line stores. . . .”⁵ Similarly, the more that airline passengers complain about delays and cancellations, the more they also complain about inconsequential matters such as peanut-versus-pretzel preferences.

⁵ Reported in The New York Times, March 25, 2001. The result cited is based on a poll conducted by Jupiter Media Metrix of New York, revealing that 70 percent of the 1,900 American shoppers polled said they would spend less at a retailer’s store if they were dissatisfied with their on-line experience.

As customers, we may be willing to let the little things slide, but disappoint us about the big things, and we’ll grouse about all matters large and small.

Numerous customers have told me that when they submitted a problem or question to their technical staff, they received no response—that is, no follow-up, no clue as to the status of their query, and—most frustrating of all—no word as to when they might be advised of the status. Maybe in a hundred-thousand years, the Black Hole will eject its contents and customers will finally get the responses they’ve been waiting for. But most customers aren’t that patient.

It’s not just those with direct customer contact who make the Black Hole such a congested place. Others in the service chain add to the congestion. I remember asking members of one help-desk group what kind of response they had received regarding problems they had transferred to a Level Two support group. “Those problems? Oh, they just disappeared into the black hole,” one woman told me.

I heard a similar comment from a software group for which I was reviewing customer-survey results. Customers generally gave the group high marks for responsiveness, but buried within the high ratings was a solid block of low ratings. “What are these ratings?” I asked. “Oh, those,” said the service manager, verbally signaling that bad news was about to follow.

“Those,” he explained, “were associated with problems that were too complex to be resolved within the time frame set by the front-line staff, and so they were passed on to the R&D group for investigation.” A group, he added, that they had privately named The Black Hole because problems submitted to them seemed never again to emerge.

Of course, providers suffer similarly when their customers aren’t forthcoming. Software developers can relate sad sagas about information that has been withheld by the very customers who expect them to deliver on time. Customers, at times, can be just as unresponsive as some providers when it comes to returning calls, delivering information, and providing notification of status.

My client Maureen became a major contributor to the Black Hole when she invited me to give a keynote presentation at a conference for which two dates were being considered. I told her I’d temporarily reserve both dates. Some weeks later, I was invited to speak at another event scheduled for one of the two dates I had on hold. I called Maureen for an update, but couldn’t reach her and so I left a message. I waited two days but Maureen didn’t call me back. I called again. No response. I sent her a fax and an e-mail message, and then I left a few more phone messages. The Black Hole filleth.

In Maureen’s case, my generous interpretation was that something had happened that kept her from being able to return my calls. Finally, one day, I called and she answered. I identified myself. She responded in a manner as friendly as if we’d just spoken the day before. I told her I’d been trying to reach her. “Oh yes,” she said, “I received your messages, but I didn’t have the information you wanted so I didn’t call you back.” I was flabbergasted.

Was Maureen being malicious in not responding to my messages? I don’t think so. I think it just didn’t occur to her that it would have been preferable to tell me she didn’t know, and would keep me posted, than to simply not respond. She may have felt awkward about not having the answer, or perhaps she had a rule for commenting that kept her from admitting she didn’t have the information I wanted. Still, none of these possibilities diminished the frustration I felt about getting no response whatsoever.

In most cases, people who don’t contact you when you are waiting for information aren’t being thoughtless; it may simply never have occurred to them to notify you. Don’t make the same mistake with your customers, however. If customer satisfaction is important to you, periodically ask yourself:

• Who is expecting a follow-up call from me?

• Who is waiting for information that’s important to them?

• Who has submitted a request and wants to know its status?

You could also ask,

• Who would appreciate receiving status information, even if they’re not actively waiting for it?

Contact those people. Tell them what you know. If you don’t know anything, tell them that. If possible, offer your best guess as to when you’ll be able to tell them something more. And if you can’t even tell them that, at least tell them that you can’t tell them. All of these efforts will demonstrate that you care.

Don’t contribute to the Black Hole. It’s crowded enough without your help.

Instead of letting customers feel ignored or forgotten, savvy professionals provide periodic updates. They keep customers informed on a regular basis even if only to tell them their problem is still in the queue. If you can be similarly responsive with your own customers—whether by phone, e-mail, database posting, or skywriting—you will probably find that they will give you extra leeway if ever you have difficulty meeting your commitments to them. Why will they exude such generosity? Because leaving customers in the dark is so pervasive and frustrating a service flaw that they will sit up and take notice when you do just the reverse. They’ll appreciate your attentiveness and thoughtfulness. In the words of one IT customer: “They don’t always have it done when I’d like, but at least they always keep me up-to-date.”

Providing updates can build trust even when service is substandard, as was demonstrated to me by Kevin, a Data Center Operations staff member who worked in a company whose customers had widespread dissatisfaction with its IT organization. Many of the customers I interviewed enthusiastically mentioned Kevin by name as someone they could count on. Did he fix problems faster than his coworkers? No. Did he prevent problems from occurring? Hardly. What he did was make a practice of keeping customers informed about the status of problems that occurred during his shift.

Kevin helped his customers in another way that made them appreciate his work, but I didn’t understand just how effective he was until he attended one of the customer-service classes I ran for his division. In one exercise in which I asked people to pair up so that one member of each pair could play the role of an Operations staff member and the other a customer, we saw why customers thought so highly of Kevin.

In the simulation, the staff member who was to contact the customer about an outage didn’t have any information about what caused it or how long it would last. The people playing customers were directed to show how upset they felt about yet another outage and how eager they were for information about its duration.

Those in the role of “customer” were encouraged to be as demanding, angry, and frustrated as they felt their own customers were with them. Most needed little encouragement! Yet, in successive pairings with different classmates, Kevin’s “customers” found themselves unable to behave in a hostile, impatient, or angry manner. They commented that when paired with Kevin, their frustration was defused by his gentle, soft-spoken manner, his obvious concern about the seriousness of the situation, and his promise to get back to them with information just as soon as he had any. With both his actual customers and his classroom “customers,” Kevin exhibited genuine caring.

Informing customers can go a long way toward minimizing their potential distress. Kevin made the conscious decision to keep customers informed. Even though he usually was the bearer of bad news, his empathetic manner earned him praise from both customers and peers.

Some sample service standards are shown below. The time frames indicated in these examples are strictly for illustrative purposes; your own standards must communicate commitments that are realistic for you.

• For acknowledging messages to the support desk: “Within one hour of receipt of an e-mail request for support, we will acknowledge your message. This acknowledgment will assure you that we have received your message and will provide an estimate of when we will respond to your inquiry.”

Notice that this service standard explains what is meant by “acknowledge,” so as to prevent misinterpretations.

• For responding to service requests: “Within one week of receipt of a service request, we will provide written details of our planned response, on the condition that all the required information is given in the request.”

Notice the constraint that is specified: To receive a response within a week, customers must supply all required information.

• For describing variations in service levels: “Our goal is to resolve problems with A-level products within one business day of notification of the problem and B-level products within five business days of notification.”

This service standard not only informs customers of the time frame for problem resolution but also encourages use of A-level products. Customers are not prohibited from using B-level products, but they are made aware that a different time frame will apply. Possibly if Ken, whose dilemma was described in Chapter 2, had communicated a similar standard regarding service levels, his customers wouldn’t have persisted in requesting help for products his division did not support.

• For alerting customers about the waiting time: “Customers placed on hold will be notified of the estimated wait for the next available agent.”

In this service standard, the duration of the wait is, of course, variable; yet knowing how long the wait is likely to be can be reassuring to customers. That was the experience of a woman who called her vendor and later described her reaction to the message she heard, “When I was put on hold and the message said I’d have a ten-minute wait, I was pleased. Not pleased at having to wait ten minutes, but at being told how long the wait would be. The message gave me information I could use to decide whether I wanted to wait or whether I would be better off hanging up and calling again later. Just being able to make that decision helped me feel I had some control over the situation.”

Service standards are at the heart of service level agreements (SLAs). Addressed more fully in Chapter 11, service level agreement standards are the outcome of a negotiation process that considers both customer needs and provider capabilities. However, even if you don’t undertake the lengthy process of negotiating an SLA, you can create service standards so that the parties with whom you interact will know what they can reasonably expect from you.

I remember a great example of this that occurred during a flight I took years ago—or rather, waited to take. Departure time had come and gone, but the fully boarded plane sat motionless at the gate.

Too often in situations like this, passengers are told nothing at all, but this occasion was different. The flight attendants on this plane knew that it would be better to give whatever information they could rather than let us sit there, agitating, fuming, and (not incidentally) driving them crazy. Since they couldn’t tell us when the delay would end, they did the next best thing: They told us when they would provide updates. Speaking over the intercom, the Flight Attendant in Charge of Giving Passengers Bad News announced: “We’re experiencing a mechanical problem, and we don’t know how long it’ll take to resolve. However, we will give you an update every fifteen minutes even if we have nothing new to tell you.”

Note the form of this announcement. The flight attendant said, in effect,

• We will keep you informed of the status of the problem.

• We have a timetable for keeping you informed.

• We’ll follow that timetable even if we have nothing new to tell you.

It was clear from the speed with which the flight attendant made the announcement that the policy for keeping customers informed already existed; airline personnel didn’t have to hastily decide what to tell us and when. You might say that the existence of this policy meant that airline personnel expected delays, and you’d be right. Delays are a reality. So are outages and malfunctions. It’s better to anticipate delays, outages, and malfunctions—and to prepare what you’re going to communicate before these situations actually occur—rather than to be forced to deal simultaneously with the problem and with your customers’ angry reactions to it.

The policy shown by this airline provides a model for a service standard that you can use when you experience network glitches, server snafus, power outages, hardware failures, or other malfunctions. Translated into service-standard format, the airline’s service commitment might go like this:

During delays, outages, or malfunctions, the duration of which is unknown, we will update customers on a specified schedule. We will advise them of this schedule, and we will adhere to it even if there is no change in status.

In certain situations, you might even ask customers how often they’d like to be updated and in what form. If you work with a specific set of customers, and have a manageable number of points of contact among them, you might establish a notification timetable based on their preferences. If you request and then accommodate these preferences, you’ll be giving customers at least a little control over the situation when they’d otherwise have none at all. And you’ll be enabling them to be responsive to their own customers, without feeling like they’re being held hostage until the next announcement.

When your plane remains parked at the gate well after departure time, is an update every fifteen minutes better than an on-time departure? Not at all. And if, promptly every fifteen minutes for the next six hours, you were told, “We still don’t have a clue,” would that be acceptable? You know the answer to that! Clearly, this type of service standard has a practical limit. But when delays occur, most customers—including your own—would rather have a little information than none at all.

If possible, you might also give customers an alternative way to carry out their business while awaiting the restoration of service. I recently received the following e-mail message from a travel agency that I’ve worked with:

Please be advised that we are not able to receive external e-mails at this time. We will alert you as soon as service is reinstated. Please call our office for assistance.

Savvy folks! In one brief message, agency personnel did three important things:

1. Instead of risking that e-mail from customers would bounce or go astray, they proactively notified customers of the problem, thereby giving people something to know instead of something to wonder about.

2. They promised to alert customers when service was restored, and did so a few hours later. Amazingly, many service providers neglect to notify customers of service restoration, leaving them unaware that the problem has been resolved.

3. They reminded customers that phone service remained available.

It’s too bad, though, that they didn’t think to include the agency’s phone number in the e-mail message, so that customers could have called without the extra step of retrieving their phone number—a step some customers might not bother to take, especially when other options for making travel arrangements are readily available.

When I ask people for examples of what they consider to be dishonest, they describe situations like the following:

• A car mechanic who said the broken car part was functioning properly when it wasn’t.

• A service representative who guaranteed morning delivery of a critical part—but as of 4 P.M., nothing had been delivered.

• A systems development team that can’t meet the deadline promised to customers.

• A doctor’s receptionist who claimed the doctor was on schedule when . . . well, you know how that goes.

On occasion, situations such as these have explanations other than dishonesty, such as,

• undetected errors (The car part really was functioning properly; it was some other part that was malfunctioning.)

• innocent misunderstandings (The representative said delivery would be made tomorrow morning but the customer misheard today.)

• new information (Technical complexities caused delays in meeting the development deadline.)

• policy snafus (The receptionist was instructed to tell patients that the doctor would see them soon.)

To the extent that these kinds of explanations apply, none of these situations reflect actual lies. Yet to the customer, they feel like dishonesty is at play. What customers mean when they say that they value honesty is that they don’t want information to be deliberately distorted or willfully withheld. They want “truthful disclosure,” as one customer put it. What’s more, they’d prefer a straightforward “I don’t know” or “I can’t” to a false promise or a fictitious explanation. They don’t want to be led on. They don’t want to be told A now and B later. And if A turns into B, they want to know immediately so they can plan accordingly.

The vehemence with which people describe their encounters with dishonesty highlights the emotional nature of this issue. When people discover they’ve been dealt with dishonestly, they react with anger, distrust, and unprintable language.

The type of dishonesty that seems to anger customers the most is when information about bad news is withheld—whether it concerns delays, problems, glitches, or unanticipated changes. Customers complain that when problems arise, they aren’t informed early enough to be able to cope with the situation. Repeatedly, customers have told me of being notified shortly before a deliverable is due that the schedule had slipped. Whether a schedule slips a week, a month, or even several months, in nearly all cases, customers could have been notified well before the deadline.

Customers also complain of being assured that their needs can be addressed, or that they can be addressed in a particular way, when the truth is otherwise. Numerous customers have told me with frustration, “If the answer is no, I wish they’d just say so, instead of saying yes now, and then no later on.”

Do you ever withhold bad news from your customers? When I ask technical professionals this question, their first response is to say no. But then they pause and reflect, and most eventually admit, some sheepishly and some with a head-slapping jolt of awareness, that the answer is yes. It seems that many of the people who abhor being treated dishonestly do withhold information from their own customers. Is it any wonder customers become angry, resentful, and distrustful?

Certainly it’s tough to be the bearer of bad news. It’s understandable to want to delay revealing that news in hopes that circumstances will change and you can recover with no one the wiser. But customers stress that they’d rather have bad news now than worse news later. For them, not having the news till later automatically makes it worse because they have less time to make appropriate adjustments, including—oh yes—notifying their own customers. Customers emphasize that they, too, have deadlines to meet and people to serve; the sooner they know of a change or a problem, the sooner they can take steps to manage the situation.

As one customer put it, reflecting the views of many others: “I know you can’t always get the job done when you said you would. But if that turns out to be the case, just let me know before the time is up.”

Most customers are reasonable people. They know that things don’t always work out as planned, and would much prefer to know the situation as it is, not as you would wish them to think it is. They want to have some control over their responsibilities, and in order to have that, they need to know the true state of things.

When customers seem overly demanding or unyielding, their behavior may be the consequence of repeatedly being on the receiving end of what they experience as blatant dishonesty. Dare to tell your customers the truth. They may not like to hear bad news, but they’ll appreciate you for giving it to them.

In my view, this issue deals less with honesty than with customers’ process expectations about knowing their options. Customers have varying preferences and process expectations. Some customers that I’ve talked to about this very matter have told me that they would want to know all their options, whether “all” means three or thirty-seven. Others prefer to know only the top few options, largely due to time constraints and limited subject-matter knowledge. Still others want to know just the top two, as judged by those on the selection team. But keep in mind, too, that a customer’s preferences are likely to vary from one circumstance to another.

What’s important in honoring the process expectation of honesty is to respect the customer’s view of what is and isn’t honest. One approach is to ask customers whether they’d prefer to know all the options, just the top ones, or some other possibility. Another approach, suggested by the IT director, is to say to the customer, “I came up with five options, two of which are strong candidates. How about if we consider those first? If you then decide you’d like to know about the others, we can consider them as well.” This is an honest approach because it respects the customers’ wishes.

When providers care about delivering good service, their actions reflect that service orientation. They don’t need to announce how much they care; their actions speak more forcefully than words ever could. Conversely, providers that declare one thing and do another are guilty of creating a communication gap that provokes cynicism, disbelief, and distrust among customers.

One place I often see evidence of this type of gap is the superstore in which the checkout clerk asks, “Did you find everything all right?” Invariably, these are the stores in which I’ve had the toughest time finding what I’m looking for—including someone to help me find what I’m looking for. When I can find neither the item I want nor anyone to help me find it, I figure the store doesn’t really care much about my business, so by the time someone at the checkout counter asks whether I’ve found everything, I no longer care.

Sometimes, the gap occurs because of a contradiction between what a person says and his or her manner or tone of voice. When I returned a rental car at the airport several weeks ago, and the rental-car agent asked, “How was the car?” her gaze was fixed on her terminal, and her somber demeanor and hushed voice suggested something less than wide-eyed interest in my response.

I noticed a similar contradiction while checking in at a hotel that proclaimed its service excellence by means of a sign posted at the Front Desk, plaques in the elevator, and a feedback survey card in my room that stressed how much the hotel staff cared about its guests. Unfortunately, on my first morning there, the caring staff failed to deliver my wake-up call and I had to rush to make it to my morning meeting on time.

The feedback card next to my telephone informed me that if I wanted an immediate response to any concern, I could describe it on the card and drop the card in the slot in the Front Desk. That was a hopeful indicator: Evidence that a service provider wants to right the wrongs its customers have experienced is an important sign of caring. So I jotted a note about not getting my wake-up call and, when I rushed out for the day, I dropped the card in the slot, mindful that all eyes were upon me as I did so.

Upon returning to my room that evening, I expected to find . . . what? An offer of a free night’s stay? Not likely. A bouquet of flowers? Not really. I expected a message with an apology. Instead . . . nothing. No evidence whatsoever, either during the remainder of my stay at the hotel or thereafter, that the hotel staff knew of my complaint, cared about it, or intended to do anything as a result of it. Claiming to care about customers’ complaints and then ignoring them is a risky message to communicate when customers can take their business—and your reputation—elsewhere.

It doesn’t take many such episodes before customers question whether claims of caring are merely a promotional bluff. Why should customers believe a service claim when experience tells them something different? Whenever there is a contradiction between an organization’s service philosophy and its actions, it’s the actions that customers notice, remember, and talk about. And it’s the actions that affect their satisfaction ratings.

It might be beneficial for you to reexamine what you communicate—intentionally or unintentionally—about your service commitment and to analyze how well that goal translates into action. Examine your actions, and question whether they accurately reflect your service orientation. If they don’t, it may be best not to spout that orientation too loudly or visibly. Otherwise, when you fall short, customers will conclude that you really don’t care.

For half the stay, I was very happy with the hotel. I enjoyed the comfy furniture in my room, the exercise room, and the friendly staff. Then two minor problems arose. The first was that when I called the Front Desk my third evening there to get some information, no one answered. I tried several times, each time letting the phone ring at least a dozen times. I finally gave up. The second problem was that the next evening, I had difficulty retrieving my phone messages. When I called the Front Desk for help, a woman gave me instructions that didn’t work. When I called again, she told me she was finishing something else, and would call me back in a few minutes. She didn’t call back. When, after a half-hour, I tried again, the man who answered gave me correct instructions.

As a frequent traveler, I’ve become accustomed to service glitches, and would have put both of these complaints behind me, but for the major problem that occurred: When I returned home after the trip, my husband told me he had tried to call me on my final evening at this hotel. The person who answered told him there was no one at the hotel by my name. He spelled it for her. She checked the log for the entire week, and insisted there was no record of my being there. Since I’d gone out for the evening and my cell phone was turned off, he had no idea where I was or what might have happened to me.

When I learned about this situation, I wrote a friendly letter to the hotel management describing my initial satisfaction and both my major and minor complaints. I asked to be reimbursed for one night’s stay. As I complete this chapter, it’s been more than a year since I sent the letter. I have received no response from the hotel and have received no reimbursement.

I don’t have to wonder if this is a hotel that really cares. I already know the answer.