CHAPTER 20
From Customer Crisis
to Excellent Service:
Lessons for the Whole
Organization
MANY PEOPLE look at the skills in this book as mainly being important for one thing: handling difficult customer situations. I would like you to rethink this idea.
My experience is that the benefits of critical customer skills go far beyond customer interactions. Deployed properly, as part of an integrated approach to training, coaching, and employee orientation, these tools can fundamentally change the morale, turnover, service quality, and success of your entire workplace. As we close, let’s look at how you can use crisis communications skills as a foundation for success.
Creating a Service Culture
Every workplace on the face of the earth will tell you that it should deliver good customer service. In my view—and more important, my experience—teaching everyone critical customer skills is the key to making this happen.
Many organizations mistakenly believe that good service is a matter of attitude. Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to succeed by asking grown men and women to change their attitudes. In my experience as a manager and consultant, real change comes from creating a culture of continuous growth and learning—in other words, by teaching people valuable life skills and making them part of something bigger than themselves.
People fundamentally do not like being told how to feel or how to behave. At the same time, most of us love learning new skills that improve our lives. And when you give everyone the same kinds of skills that other crisis professionals use, you give them the gift of confidence and leadership. This, in turn, always leads to dramatically better service.
Watch Me Handle This
Once I was shadowing agents at a large call-center operation as part of a consulting visit. As soon as I sat down with one woman a customer came on the line, and it was clear that he wasn’t happy—because I could hear him shouting right through the earpiece of her headset. Then this agent put him on hold, turned to me with a smile, and said quietly, “Watch me handle this.”
Then she went back to the call and nailed it with the perfection of Michael Jordan sinking a three-pointer. She acknowledged his frustrations, validated his concerns, and laid out his options in a way that made her sound like his best friend and advocate.
In my own career of managing customer support operations, sometimes when an upset customer would demand to “speak to the manager”—that would be me—some of my agents would sit in my office and listen to us talk on the speakerphone. Of course, my goal was to send the customer away happy. But I also had another equally important objective: showing my team how to go into these situations with confidence.
Managing Internal Conflict
Do you work with people who gossip? Are backstabbers? Create drama on a regular basis? Or perhaps have retired on the job and forgot to tell you about it?
Guess what? All of these people are difficult customers too—difficult internal customers. And the way you address these energy-sapping, productivity-killing behaviors is by using exactly the same kinds of communications skills that you use with difficult external customers.
Scratch the surface of most workplaces and you will usually find these behaviors being handled through anger, frustration, or punishment. Unfortunately, these approaches rarely work well. But when people learn to speak to the interests and positions of others, using strength-based communication, everything changes.
When I am called in as a therapist to do workplace interventions with teams in conflict, the vast majority of my work involves using exactly the same kinds of communications skills taught in this book for handling challenging customer situations. By learning and practicing these skills, employees and managers alike can become their own “therapists” and help create a more harmonious and productive workplace.
How to Talk to a Backstabber
In live workshops, I often ask attendees how they would talk to people who are “stabbing them in the back”—in other words, saying negative things about them to others. Their answers are almost always the same: Confront them, call them on their behavior, and demand they stop it.
Next, I ask for a show of hands of how many of them have never, ever expressed an opinion about someone at work. No one ever raises a hand, of course. Then I point out that although I intentionally used the emotionally charged phrase “stabbing them in the back” to describe this behavior, in reality it is something nearly everyone normally does.
Then we look at what they might say in order to productively open dialogue, and often end up with something like this: “You probably don’t feel you get a fair shake here. You might think some people get breaks that you don’t. You probably even talk about people here to others, just like I do. I’d like to see if there are ways we could work together in the future so I could support you. What do you think?”
Personal Growth
I speak forty to fifty times a year all over North America. Do you know what the most common comment is that I hear from these audiences after I speak?
“I can’t wait to try these techniques at home!”
There is actually some good science behind this statement. Many of the techniques described in this book spring from theories of marriage and family therapy, designed around working with couples and families in conflict. The same skills that calm down customers can also open dialogue with your partner, your parents, your teenagers, or your mother-in-law.
So if you teach your team members how to defuse customer conflict, you are giving them skills that impact the rest of their lives in a positive way. Their daily work with customers reinforces these skills and helps them foster good family and workplace relationships, which in turn leads to happier employees. It is a win-win situation that costs the organization little or nothing.
This point was driven home to me recently after I had taught a workshop in acknowledgment skills. One workshop participant came up to me with a broad smile of recognition on her face. She exclaimed, “Now I finally understand my husband! He is an interrogator with a national law enforcement agency, and he is so good with people. No one can ever get in an argument with him!” (Hopefully, she can now match him skill for skill at the dinner table.) Crisis skills are life enhancing, and with the right environment at work, they can become contagious.
Communicating as an Organization
Finally, communications skills for difficult situations can often become the hallmark of a great organization, particularly in its most critical and public moments.
History is full of examples of corporations that issued shortsighted and self-serving statements that damaged their public reputations, often at the worst possible times. By contrast, good crisis communication has often been part of the signature moments of many companies. Witness, for example, the very public and detailed apology from JetBlue’s CEO after hundreds of its passengers were stranded in an ice storm in 2007, or how Johnson & Johnson handled the Tylenol-tampering scandal of the 1980s. The very same skills we discuss in this book for customer crises, such as owning criticism and acknowledging other people’s positions, apply at the highest level of the boardroom as well.
At a deeper level, organizations also brand themselves in the ways that they communicate day in and day out with their employees. Understanding how to use language effectively can serve as an antidote to the bland, infuriating corporate twaddle that often announces changes ranging from new rules to layoffs. The same skills that create good customer service, when deployed across an entire organization, can form the foundation for a workplace that is liked and trusted by everyone.
Creating an Organizational Apology
In 1987, it came to light that Chrysler Motors had sold as new cars vehicles that had actually been test-driven by its managers with the odometers disconnected, and even in some cases damaged in accidents and repaired. This led to substantial negative publicity and declining showroom traffic.
In the face of this crisis, Chrysler’s then-chairman, Lee Iacocca, crafted a legendary apology. He expressed concern for Chrysler’s customers and their faith in the company, promised to make things right, and then took complete ownership for what happened in refreshingly blunt language: “We did do something to make our customers question their faith in us—two things, in fact. . . . The first thing was just dumb, [and] the second, I think, went beyond dumb, and reached all the way out to stupid.” He then closed by apologizing and promising that the situation would never happen again.
According to communications expert John Kador, author of the book Effective Apology, Iacocca’s handling of this customer-satisfaction crisis was pitch-perfect. “First, he acknowledged that the customer had a legitimate grievance. Second, he accepted full responsibility, effectively saying that, ‘I agree with you. We messed up.’ Third, he apologized by being very direct, without equivocation.”
The net result was that Chrysler ultimately survived the crisis. As Kador notes, “If you empathize, admit the error, accept responsibility, say you’re sorry, provide restitution, and promise not to do it again, you will find that most customers will be incredibly forgiving and become stronger allies for your brand.”
The Bottom Line
If I could choose just one thing that would create happy customers, happy employees, sales increases, and successful organizations, it would be teaching everyone how to communicate successfully with their most difficult customers. The reason I am so passionate about these skills is that I have seen them work so well, and so consistently, for organizations I have managed and consulted for.
There is a personal side to this journey for me. I grew up extremely conflict avoidant. The thought of being confronted by people was incredibly frightening for me. Early in life, I felt that the ability to handle difficult situations was the exclusive domain of people who were somehow stronger, braver, or smarter than I was. As I grew into adulthood and studied psychology, it was a life-changing gift to discover that these talents were simply a matter of linguistics. And today I live a very happy life putting myself into the worst customer service situations you can imagine, week after week.
My goal is to give the same gift to you and to your organization—the gift of confidence. And the gift of effective negotiation. And the gift of organizational growth. And, above all, the gift of sending more customers away happy than you could have ever imagined possible. Use it, teach it, and spread it far and wide. Best of success!