chapter 3

timeless customer
service done right—
and wrong
mastery versus catastrophe

the ongoing revolution in communications, connectivity, and automation, including mobile telephony, user-generated content (social media), advances in interactive and self-service technologies, and of course the internet in general, has profoundly affected how commercial interactions, including customer service, are undertaken. So have other less visible factors, such as process improvements like “lean manufacturing” (a popular management philosophy rooted in the Toyota Production System), that have been a force in many industries.¹ In light of these changes, and in consideration of all that is timeless, what does a great customer-centered company look like today? And what about its evil—or clueless—twin?

the masterful company

The companies that are doing best by their customers in our high-tech world are created by true company builders with broad skill sets, not single-minded technologists. Whether a great company offers a technological product (Apple, NetApp, Qualcomm) or not (L.L. Bean, Zap-pos, Starbucks, even your corner dry cleaner, thriving against all odds), to create long-term success, a vision of the desired experience needs to come before the deployment of technology.

Let’s focus on a dozen characteristics that are common to masterful companies, businesses that delight their customers by providing outstanding, customer-friendly service throughout the range of their interactions and interfaces. How does a masterful company, high tech or otherwise, look and feel to a new or existing customer?

1. The masterful company makes customers feel welcomed even before they physically or figuratively arrive, regardless of which channel of approach they use. Whether on the web, via email, telephone, social media, chat, or videoconference, employees welcome customers, offering particular, intimate, and thorough knowledge of their location, their brand, their company.

The company frequently vets online, telephone, and other inbound experiences to ensure these are functioning and up to date; any channel the customer may use to approach the company has been recently checked for validity and ease of entry. This is true not only on the company’s own sites but on third-party sites as well, like Google Places. (It’s important to keep in mind that customers don’t blame Google but rather the merchant if hours and location are posted incorrectly. They assume—by and large correctly—that the company has had ample opportunity to update its information and keep it current.) Negative comments on Yelp, TripAdvisor, and similar forums have been politely responded to, so the arriving customer knows that the company, even if not perfect, is at least concerned with addressing imperfections and striving to improve customer service at every turn.

2. The company strips the customer’s arrival experience of barriers that might hamper the experience. A masterful company doggedly works to remove barriers so the entrance experience is smooth and welcoming, whether those barriers are, legalistically speaking, its responsibility or not. In the brick-and-mortar (physical) world, for example, parking and other transportation needs of customers are considered carefully. Driving directions offered are impeccably accurate, and GPS coordinates are provided as appropriate. If parking on the street is necessary, the company provides change for meters along with reminders to feed those meters, or has valets standing by to assist. In an online “entrance,” the sign-in process is streamlined. There are ideally no CAP-TCHAs (visual security challenges) that visitors are required to slog through in order to use the contact forms on the company website. Or if there are CAPTCHAs, due to spam or hacking concerns, they’re accompanied by an intelligible, user-friendly audio component so people with visual disabilities, or those using your site via an itsy-bitsy smartphone keyboard, aren’t locked out. A customer never has to sort through hundreds of choices to select his home country, when that could be easily determined by IP address or general knowledge of the customer base.

3. Employees show an obvious, sincere interest in customers. Watch for it: These employees may actually appear to have a certain visible glow, even in the most befuddling customer service situations. Employees give their elective efforts rather than sticking to the minimum that will keep them out of disciplinary action.

4. The company honors its customers’ desire for self-service… but with clearly visible escape hatches. A customer who has opted for self-service is never left hanging without available support or an escape route, nor is he otherwise penalized for his choice. For example, retailers who offer self-checkout lines keep service attendants nearby to help customers who experience unexpected difficulties operating the register; on the phone, properly configured IVRs (interactive voice response systems) allow customers to reach a human operator the way that they expect—by hitting “O” or saying “agent.” Online, FAQs include an option at the end of each answer for customers to receive further assistance via live support when the provided answer has failed to serve successfully.

5. Processes, technologies, and facilities have been put in place that anticipate the customer’s needs and desires. Anticipatory service means more than hiring the right people, empathetic people who each individually take responsibility for anticipating what customers want. While the right people are central to delivering great service, it’s also important to align systems with customers’ desires—even before these desires are voiced. A company accomplishes this by first making it clear internally that its goal is to learn to think like customers, observe and predict their behavior, query them on their desires, and tabulate the responses so the company can anticipate what customers want next. Then it has to take the crucial next step: building this knowledge and attitude into systems, facilities, and processes.

For example: Due to a dusting of snow on the runway during a Philadelphia winter, I was delayed a couple hours on the tarmac. Not surprisingly, I missed my connection in Denver. But as I stepped off the plane in Denver, thinking I was going to need to wait in an endless line and plead my case for a rebooking, or call the 800 number and wait on hold, a gate agent from Southwest came to me, with a sheaf of already-rebooked tickets in hand. She asked my name and then handed me the correct one—for the very next available flight to my destination.

6. The company keeps customer time constraints and pacing needs front and center. The company never wastes the customer’s time; masterful businesses are no-waiting zones. As a corollary of this, the pacing needs and expectations of individual customers are taken into account by engaged, skilled staff or well-conceived technology. For example, the time-stressed internet executive is treated differently from the leisurely tourist, based on cues received. These cues can be picked up face to face or over the telephone by an attentive human, or by receptive software that allows users to hit “not now” for multiple options in order to cut to the chase online.

7. The customer’s emotional state and needs are paramount. A customer isn’t someone to be rushed off the phone or exclusively there to be upsold (or sold, for that matter). A customer might be calling or visiting due to temporary loneliness or for a little reassurance regarding a delivery or to ask questions about a product or service, rather than to satisfy any immediate commercial need. And yet, addressing these noncommercial desires sensitively is what will ultimately result in a profitable relationship.

8. The company recognizes and keeps in consideration the unique realities of the customer’s individual situation. In other words, employees recognize that even if the vast majority of customer interactions follow one of several typical scenarios, each experience is unique to that customer from the customer’s point of view. Responding to my keynote speech for SYTA (Student and Youth Travel Association), a tour operator in attendance explained the attitude he brought to work every day: “No matter how many times I’ve previously given a tour of the government sites in Washington, D.C., for example, I consciously work to remember that for this group of kids this tour is their first and maybe only one.”

What a perfect attitude! But apart from attitude, how does this play out policy-wise? Maybe a company is proud of responding to support queries “with a goal of twelve hours.” It even promotes that promise in its advertising. That’s commendable—if it’s a first query. But to make a customer wait twelve hours between queries when the answer to the first query was “Please tell me which operating system your computer uses and I’ll get right back to you” is unacceptable—and, sadly, typical for many companies. The reality of the situation is that the company needs to shoot for a total of twelve hours, plus maybe a wee bit more, to resolve this issue, even though it was presented in two, rather than one, correspondence. A company with masterful customer service understands this.

9. Standards exist—and are followed. For example, a doorman at a great hotel is rarely blindsided by a guest trying to enter while the doorman’s back is turned. How can that be? Standards. In this case, the standard is usually that “doormen work in teams.” They simply face each other and subtly tip each other off if someone is coming from behind. They quite literally have each other’s back, leading to a consistently comfortable, welcoming, hospitable experience.

10. Something extra is standard. For masterful companies, providing something extra is the standard throughout the customer experience. These extras are always the things the more shortsighted among a company’s stakeholders want to cut first, but without them it’s almost impossible to differentiate your service. When you purchase an Apple iPad, you know it’s going to enable you to read e-books. Super. So does the industry-leading Kindle. And the Nook. And the Kobo. And the Sony Reader. You realize you’re dealing with an exceptional company committed to the “unexpected extra” when you electronically “turn” a page on the iPad—and can literally read the letters on the flip side in reverse, “through” the digital page, as if it’s a real book printed on not-quite-opaque paper. Great service in the physical world works the same way. As Horst Schulze of the Ritz-Carlton said during an earlier recession, just because times are tight doesn’t mean a luxury hotel should omit special, distinguishing touches such as bouquets of flowers changed daily. Guests in that context aren’t buying four walls and a ceiling but a carefully calibrated experience of the exceptional. And if they don’t receive it, they’re unlikely to make a point of returning.

11. The company strives for efficiencies where appropriate, but never at the customer’s expense. Service is a unique situation as far as modern business theories of just-in-time and continuously improved efficiency go. Such manufacturing-derived techniques work for service in many behind-the-scenes functions; however, a significant amount of inefficiency, ahead-of-time, and over stocking are necessary if you want to be ready for any customer contingency. Masterful companies understand where to make use of Toyota/Lean-style systems and where they’re inappropriate.

12. The customer experience is always being improved. As customers, we all place a certain value on consistency and familiarity when it comes to painlessly ordering or experiencing goods and services. When I order something online from a company I’ve visited before, I expect the menu screen to be essentially the same as I’ve become accustomed to—I don’t want to bother with relearning the ordering protocol. Just as when I phone my heating oil company to place an order, I expect the usual protocol: to be told the current price per gallon, to be given a reasonable time frame for the delivery, and to have the delivery driver already know exactly where my fill spout is and how to get to it, without requiring me to be home at the time.

However, while customers value a feeling of consistency, a masterful company knows it always needs to improve, even to maintain that semblance of consistency, because customer expectations are continually being amplified.

In the early twentieth century, just about thirty years after the telephone was invented and greeted with awe, Marcel Proust wrote with his customary vividness about how unappreciated the phone had already become. People were treating it as an ordinary nuisance, spending more time complaining when hum or static broke up the line than on recognizing the essential wonder of this still quite new technology.³ What was true of the telephone then is true with all aspects of the customer experience, and today the timetable in which perceptions change is much shorter than thirty years. What was a groundbreaking improvement in customer convenience last year is ho-hum today; what was timely last week feels as slow now as a dial-up modem.

A masterful company understands this and adapts and retools continually. For instance, a retail chain’s simply stated goal with each new location could be: Make this store better than the last one. Period. This is an optimal way to improve with every store opening and also avoid endless second-guessing and regrets about past shortfalls.

We’ll revisit each of these twelve elements as this book progresses. Each is worth its weight in customers.

a cameo of catastrophe: timeless service done tragically wrong

Maybe meeting these twelve benchmarks for masterful customer-serving companies doesn’t sound all that daunting. Good—I’d prefer you remain undaunted. Yet there are so many opposing examples around us, the essentially anti-customer (and universally anti-employee) companies and organizations that plug along and fail to distinguish themselves from the competition, that barely meet expectations—and never exceed them, unless by chance. To be a masterful company means meeting and defeating every potentially self-destructive element, so examining these negative elements in their native form, so to speak, can be instructive. Let’s invest a little time to explore what a great company doesn’t look like. Like a fire-and-brimstone preacher’s vividly painted vision of hell, taking this kind of peek into the abyss clarifies things quickly.

To pick the most basic example, I’d like you to join me for some day-to-day food shopping. Because what should be more positive and straightforward than a well financed, fully staffed, properly sited grocery store, right? Well, let’s check it out. Here’s a gourmet food store located in a suburban neighborhood I won’t name (although, again, I find myself tempted). It’s a boutique brand owned by a corporate parent, and the store couldn’t hope for a better location and demographic. It’s surrounded by dual-income professional households and a number of old-money families as well, whose members have high levels of education—there are four colleges within three miles, and so on.

Let’s start our tour. We’re in for some unsavory surprises.

Entrance and Pre-Entrance Blunders. Even before we get to the store’s location, it’s clear that interacting with the store, or trying to, doesn’t work so well. Before driving to the grocery, we check its website for directions and hours, yet come up empty-handed. Oh, but there’s a live-chat button on the site, so let’s try that. After an interminable two minutes, someone answers. Actually, it’s unclear that it is “someone”; it feels more like some kind of auto-program because the scripts the chat spits back at us lack any personality or any direct knowledge of the store.

Giving up on the store’s website, we find its location on Google Maps, as well as its hours of operation. Unfortunately, the hours posted on Google Maps and Google Places are incorrect. (In fact, they’ve been wrong for sixteen months, but nobody appears to have contacted Google to correct them. That, of course, can leave customers like us stranded in front of closed doors.)

Let’s try to remain unfazed. On a second attempt, we arrive in the grocery store’s parking lot when the store is actually open. The first noticeable obstacle is a literal one: the curb of a shopping cart corral. One of the shopping cart corral’s curbs is positioned to make it all but impossible for a customer in a wheelchair to exit the adjacent handicapped parking space. For anyone shopping who has disabilities or whose friends or family are disabled, this makes a less-than-positive impression. (More in Chapter 9 on inviting in customers with disabilities.)

Back Atcha. Let’s stroll into the store. The first unmissable visual element here is a youngish woman arranging balsamic vinegar jars on an endcap, with her backside facing squarely—make that roundly—at us. She’s definitely poorly oriented for being able to greet customers and, in fact, doesn’t give us a greeting. An anomaly? Unfortunately not. Walking through the store, there’s nobody, even among those employees with their front sides oriented toward us, who will take the time or effort to acknowledge our entrance or very existence. No “Hi, how ya doin’?” No smile. Zip.

The Emperor’s New Carts. Despite being ignored at the door, let’s roll one of the store’s nice-looking but top-heavy mini shopping carts through the store and pick out some items. Sounds easy enough—if you’ve never tried rolling hard rubber wheels on high-fashion ceramic floor tiles, the ones with uneven glazes and huge breaks between tiles to display thick, artisanal styled mortar. Buh-dump, buh-dump, buh du-du-du-duhmp. Sounds like artillery fire and feels jarring. Repetitive wrist strain seems to set in within a dozen yards of the entrance.

We Make It … to the Checkout Counter. Not allowing any of this to get us down, we manage to pick out some groceries and make it to the checkout counter. At the cash register, there she is: the first human being who—strictly by virtue of functional placement and positioning—must face us directly, I mean smack dab face to face. Wait—this might be a moment of human connection!

Nope. We’re not even acknowledged. The cashier indeed engages in conversation, a conversation with her fellow cashiers, and the details of an unsuccessful date last night drone on even though she has to stretch her neck sideways like a performer from Cirque du Soleil in a maneuver that directs her voice to her coworkers.

Also disheartening is how she plops our chosen items into shopping bags, dropping pungent cheese into the same bag as competingly pungent sushi, heavy items atop crushables. We might hope that by not making human contact with us, the cashier would have more attention free to achieve proper bagging technique, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.

A Floral Catastrophe. Sometimes the most instructive encounter you can have with an organization will occur at the edges of its operation: opening or closing time. I myself was treated to an instructive and poignant encounter when I wandered into this same gourmet store’s floral shop. Come with me again, this time to observe as a fly on the wall. The hour? About 6:45 on a weekday evening (they close at 7:00, as is posted on the front door—though still not on Google). I’m here to buy some flowers, but I have just a vague idea which variety, so I’m browsing casually when, within about three minutes, the one employee there demands to know if I’m ready to buy. I tell her I’m not, yet. She keeps pressing, but offers no guidance on selection, telling me rather forcefully, “We close at seven.”

With deliberate gentleness, I respond, “Actually, I think you probably are supposed to close only when the last customers leave, as long as they get in the door by seven.” To my astonishment, she changes tone entirely, openly and innocently responding, “Really? I didn’t know that. I get in so much trouble when I punch out even a minute after seven, so I’ve always thought the rule was ‘all customers out of the store by seven.’”

What goes into creating such a glaring example of what not to do? Let’s take a look, working our way backward through the grocery store.

Against Employees, Against Customers. My final floral cameo contains within it much of what you need to know about catastrophically anti-customer companies. They’re not just anti-customer but anti-employee, and they end up harming customers with ill-advised policies, such as “don’t punch out a minute after seven, even if this means launching your customers out the exit.” Any procedures they have in place are based on a superficial and unsustainable version of trying to promote the bottom line. This approach will only backfire with unfortunate, even devastating, results.

Without Purpose or Standards. Similarly but in more depth, let’s look at what went wrong at the checkout register. The cashier was thinking only about her superficial function—to ring us up, take our money, and drop items into a bag—and not about her purpose in the organization, which, I’d argue, is to be the warm, human end point in an engaging and pleasant shopping experience for us, the customers. Her lack of understanding is the end result of mistraining and misleadership.

Second, there are no standards being followed for her particular job function. Which items to bag together, or to avoid grouping together, is one of a number of simple standards that are easy to teach and learn yet can be so damaging to a customer’s experience with a business if performed improperly. Standards must be taught, measured, and reinforced. The devil is often in the unstandardized details.

Third, the cashier avoided giving even the slightest extra effort in support of her customers. In fact she pointedly avoided it—willing to risk neck strain to talk with her friends rather than pay attention to the real job at hand—which, let me reiterate, is pleasing customers not just bagging groceries. Why? It likely comes down to her not feeling invested in her company and the effective customer interactions required for its success.

The Source of Customer-Facing Backsides and Noncommunicative Workers. How can an employee fail to make contact with—or even show her face to—an entering customer? How can staff member after staff member not acknowledge our presence in the store? Well, they’re busy: with stocking and straightening items on the already-sparkling shelves and with the million other duties they’ve been assigned. Yet, just like our cashier, they haven’t been tasked with their ultimate purpose: taking care of the customer. This problem can’t be fully repaired until the entire culture of the organization is fixed. (I know that sounds disheartening, but the cure is only a few chapters ahead, in Chapters 5 through 7.)

Bumpy Carts and Misplaced Curbs. What about the misdesigned, wheelchair-blocking curb and the stress-inducing ceramic floor? To some extent, this comes from “not being your own customer”—in this case, from the majority of employees parking in the employee parking lot behind the store and entering through a separate entrance. Thus, few of them discover for themselves what it’s like to go in through the front entrance that customers use, see the blocked-in wheelchair parking space, etc. (The exception to this being the junior employees tasked with gathering and moving the carts back out the door as need be. If they’ve noticed the problems, they haven’t piped up, or their input has been ignored.) It also comes from misunderstanding the reasons for doing certain things—doing them only to avoid punishment rather than for wholistic reasons. In the case of this grocery, the parking lot appears to have been striped for handicapped parking without thought or planning from the vantage point of actual customer usage, but rather for the sole purpose of meeting the minimum required by local and national ordinances and stay out of trouble. So if the owners can get away with ignoring the barriers that keep disabled customers out of their store—actually putting a curb that’s impossible to roll over between them and the front door—so be it. Of course, they may be cutting out a segment of their market base: disabled people and those who care about them.

Doing things for the wrong reasons and, as a consequence, doing them poorly is often endemic in bad companies. Businesses that are inflexible in work hours tend to only get low-quality work from their employees during the rigidly enforced hours that people are on the clock.⁴ Companies that are unfair or overly rigid with sick-day enforcement nearly guarantee that healthy employees will take every sick day they can get away with. Companies unavoidably end up creating hazardous workplaces when they forget the reason for safety training is safety, not simply trying to “keep OSHA off our asses.” Ultimately, these companies that are driven only by avoiding regulatory trouble end up with bitter customers. Or likely no customers, because there’s no legislation that can require anyone to shop there.

Well, I know this has been a downer—an instructional downer, I hope, but a downer nonetheless … I’m glad to say we’re going somewhere sunnier next: where the Apples are polished ’til they’re shiny.

“and your point is?”

Here are twelve points common to masterful companies:

1. The company welcomes customers—via whichever channel the customer approaches—even before the customer, physically or figuratively, arrives. The company constantly vets the online, telephone, and other inbound experiences of its customers.

2. Once the customer arrives, all barriers are removed that could potentially hamper the experience.

3. Employees have a sincere, overarching interest in customers.

4. The customer’s desire to handle things via self-service is honored … but with readily available escape hatches.

5. The company has put processes, technologies, and facilities in place that anticipate the customer’s needs and desires. In other words, in addition to hiring empathetic people who anticipate what customers want, the company designs its systems to be aligned with customers’ desires, even before these are voiced.

6. The company keeps customer time constraints and concerns front and center in its awareness—a customer’s time is never wasted. As a corollary of this, the pacing needs and expectations of individual customers are taken into account.

7. The customer’s emotional state and needs are paramount. For example, the company welcomes calls from customers even when those calls don’t have immediate commercial value.

8. The company recognizes and keeps in consideration the unique realities of the customer’s individual situation. Even if the vast majority of customer interactions follow one of several typical scenarios, employees recognize that each experience is unique to that customer from the customer’s point of view.

9. Standards exist—and are followed.

10. Something extra is standard. Without unexpected extras, it’s almost impossible to differentiate your service.

11. Efficiencies are strived for where appropriate, but never at the customer’s expense. A significant amount of inefficiency, ahead-of-time (as opposed to “just-in-time”), and overstocking may be necessary in order to be ready for any customer contingency.

12. The customer experience is always being improved, often via continuous improvement methods derived originally from manufacturing methodology, subject to the caveat in point number 11.