chapter 13

listening
your ears are your most important technology

to circle back to the theme I introduced a bit raunchily at the start of Chapter 1, customer service can benefit from a lifetime of refinement of your technique. To move the discussion above the belt, the portion of customer service that could be termed listening, broadly defined to include hearing, sensing, interpreting, reviewing, and comprehending, is one area that can especially benefit from this lifetime of refinement: tuning your organization’s ears, in other words. By hiring properly, you’ll have (mangling my anatomical metaphor) started your ears off on the right foot: You’ll have selected employees specifically for their level of empathy (the “E” in “WETCO”). This really is the enchanted point of entry. The natural strengths of these employees can then be toned through guidance from supervisors and from peers already embedded in a culture that values listening.

only one perspective that matters

Not long ago, I had the chance to watch a skillful manager field a complaint from a guest who was hesitantly bringing up her concerns. Here’s the customer (after describing a troubling interaction): “Of course, your employee may have a different perspective from mine on how this went down.”

The manager’s immediate response: “Ma’am, as far as we’re concerned, there’s only one perspective that matters.”

Which is a good way of looking at it. As a business, the primary perspective that matters to you, if you want to stay in business, is the customer’s. Even when it’s arguably a misperception on the part of the customer, you need to hear that misperception, feel that misperception, own that misperception. Figure out how it can be avoided in the future, for other customers as well as this one, by aligning the perspective of your insiders (employees) to that of the outsiders (customers) you want to welcome in.

I don’t want you to misapprehend this sentiment and take it to mean that the feelings and humanity of your employees don’t matter. They matter enormously. They matter because:

They affect how your employees treat customers.

They affect how customers feel about your company, when you’re high-touch like Hyatt: Consider the uproar, including boycott calls¹ and the passing of new legislation,² that occurred after the three Hyatt hotels in Boston fired their entire house-keeping staffs without notice, replacing them with outsourced temps lacking benefits or direct accountability. And when you’re high-tech like Amazon.com, a company praised often in these pages and previously viewed by many customers as wholly benign, that suffered a change in public perception after investigative reporting revealed that more than a dozen workers in Amazon’s Allegheny County, PA, warehouse suffered hospitalization-inducing heat exposure from warehouse temperatures of up to 114 degrees in the summer of 2011.³ (Amazon.com responded to the heat and suffering by offering the workers “popsicles,” “5 minute additional breaks,” and “heat hardening training.”)⁴

Employees are customers too. They know customers, they blog to customers, they’re married to customers. It’s a highly transparent world. You need to work with your employees, and for your employees, because they’re who will create the ultimate customer perspective, whether bad, indifferent, or transcendent.

sanctuary much: the s.m.a.r.t. approach to the human force field

Culture, employee selection, positive peer pressure—these are keys to developing your company’s listening skills—its ears. And until you build this philosophical and human backdrop, specific training is less than fully effective. You can’t “concentrate on the nuts and bolts” when you lack a framework. But detailed training is indeed very valuable once you have this framework, and the type of training likely to have impact includes both classroom-style learning and the role-playing and scenario-driven activities that challenge your employees as realistically and as aggressively as possible. One of the reasons that pre-training with realistic scenarios is important is because of a particular self-inflicted challenge: You’ve hired friendly people, and they’ll be used to working with other friendly people, whom you’ve also hired. But not all customers are friendly all of the time. This is akin to how crowd-control troops are repeatedly pre-tested with provocations before heading in to face a crowd that will try to make them lose their cool; thus your “troops” need to be trained in possible customer reactions they may encounter and in responding in the best possible way.

Ultimately, let’s face it: The situation of serving others is different from being served. As someone calling himself Ishmael puts it when signing on as a sailor in Moby Dick, “There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.” That inherent positional difference, compounded by any difference between employee and customer in temperament, time sensitivity, socioeconomic status, and more can wreak havoc if your team hasn’t been through it all before and learned to think on their feet (or, to make a stab at keeping my physique-speak consistent, on their ears).

One of the points your training should convey is that individual customers are the backbone of business growth. This makes it important for your team to get good at sensing the extent to which your customer’s individual protective shell or force field is open or closed at any particular moment. A proper training curriculum in anticipatory service helps staff members learn to recognize—anticipate—when and when not to venture near and into the customer’s protective bubble, the invisible sanctuary within which the customer has expectations of solitude. Here are the principles of this human force field, forming my acronym SMART:

Start: The customer expects service to begin the moment she comes into contact with the staff person. In person, a warm greeting should include eye contact and a smile. (A note for busy offices: Sometimes this needs to be accomplished even if your employee’s on the phone or speaking with another customer; for example, a busy checkout/reception desk attendant may need to learn how to work with one customer while visually acknowledging the presence of a new arrival.)

Messages: If you can read the messages customers are giving off, you’ll know the level of service they want at any given moment, including “no service now.” For example, if a guest catches a server’s eye, it may be merely accidental, but if the guest holds the server’s gaze, it usually means he’s expecting to be offered assistance.

Adjust: Staff members need to adjust to the pace of each customer. Some customers are highly time-aware; others are as laid back as the day is long. This isn’t detectable only in person, by the way: Cues can be discerned on the phone, in live online chat, via videoconferencing, etc.

Re-order: Even if it inconveniences you, re-order your work activities to suit the customer’s needs. True service can never be slave to checking things off in a predetermined order on an employee’s to-do list. Attending properly to a customer means adhering to the customer’s schedule, not the other way around. The key, again, is to listen : If a guest is in the middle of proposing to his sweetheart, don’t choose that moment to ask if his steak was cooked to the proper temperature!

Terminate: Reseal the force field by terminating the encounter … or not? At the apparent end of service, it’s the service professional’s responsibility to ask if anything additional is needed, and, if it isn’t, to graciously thank the customer before leaving her in the sanctuary of her invisible force field. Again, this can apply in a chat sequence, a series of emails, or on the phone, as well as, of course, in person.

using electronic systems to enhance your listening

In commerce that incorporates self-service, a customer can set things up for himself by entering helpful personal details, a theme I’ve touched on earlier. This is a valuable type of electronic “listening”—or maybe it should be termed “recording”—and is an option expected by many of today’s customers. It’s a good way to avoid typos and to allow the entry of information that can be hard for a service provider to get right in all its nuances, such as instructions to leave packages under the left-hand side of the back porch if nobody is home. At my company, Oasis, the “my account” system we’ve built allows customers, if they like, to enter this kind of information and to update it 24/7 from whatever time zone they reside in.

Another element of electronic listening is to build “listening devices” into your communications with customers. Here are some examples:

Surveys aren’t only a chance to gather statistical data but also an opportunity to hear from individual customers and to respond quickly, and when the survey format is electronic it makes it possible for this interaction to happen nearly in real time. Make this your operating philosophy and make your philosophy clear in the survey’s language. In other words, inform the person filling out the survey that individual input is both invited and will be responded to promptly. (More on this below, under “Surveying the Landscape.”)

FAQ-style self-service and automated messaging are, again, improved when you add an option to them that allows the customer to reach a human being when desired.

Sometimes you may want to send out, with no further marketing bent or statistical goal in mind, an unadorned invitation to customers to speak their minds. At my company, for years I’ve sent out an invitation like this by email, from my “President and Founder’s Desk,” to each prospective customer, as a follow-up to the more marketing-directed emails our customers receive. Without any other agenda, this letter invites the recipient to sound off to me with anything on her mind.

This kind of correspondence, of course, has to be handled carefully: It should include chances to opt out, and most important, when customers respond to the email, those responses should come directly to you (as they do to me), and you should be ready to review and reply. With many companies, by contrast, when a customer responds to one of the company’s directly worded auto-emails, what happens? Nothing. This is one of the fastest credibility killers there is. For example, as a prospective customer, I recently tried an online backup service for my computer. When the thirty-day trial was up, I received a note, signed by the data storage company’s CEO, sporting the bail bondsmanesque headline “Your Trial Is Up—What Happened?” and continuing on in this vein and tone. I replied to the email, explaining the specific reasons I hadn’t signed on after the free trial and how the company could turn the situation around and win my business. What response did my note receive? Nothing. Apparently the email had been sent out under the assumption that I would go back to the site and re-up through the normal channels. But an email like this should be sent out as a listening device, with the sender waiting to listen with open ears to any customer or prospect who’s interested enough to respond.

One of the best areas for enhanced listening and for creating anticipatory magic is where the lines intersect between electronic systems and human service. This requires you to have your humans and your systems working together in harmony. When this junction is well thought out, and handled with a nimble touch, you have an especially good chance to make your customer feel that everything’s taken care of, that there’s no need to explain oneself, that everything’s anticipated. For example, if the technological systems of a great hotel are working in alignment with an empathetic and properly trained staff, magic can happen. A friend—the well-travelled CEO of an engineering firm, not someone easily impressed—experienced this not long ago:

We arrived at a hotel in a rural Swiss town one afternoon—a hotel of significant size—and that evening had dinner in its restaurant, a very elegant place with a fine wine list and great service. The next evening we wanted to have a glass of wine in our room before going out to a different restaurant. I dialed room service and told the gentleman who answered that I would like to order a bottle of wine to be brought to our room. The gentleman said immediately, after using my name to address me, “Would you like the same wine you had last night?” While he of course had accessed my name based on the room number I’d called from, to know that we had been in the restaurant, had ordered wine, and which particular wine, was quite a remarkable feat—especially in a hotel of at least 150 rooms operating close to capacity.⁵

Close communication and note-taking by the staff in different areas of the facility made this experience possible, and the contrast here to typical organizational siloing resulted in a transcendent service moment. I doubt my friend would have been as enchanted by the experience if he himself had been required to scour a wine list for last night’s wine selection, then request the wine by name. There’s something captivating about the human service experience, as long as humanity isn’t used as an excuse to resist employing the best of processes and technology.

it’s all about listening—and it starts by opening yourself to hearing

Who in your company should do customer service? “Everyone” has always been my intentionally provocative answer. Now, I want to ask a similar question: Who should help you improve your customer service? Again, I’d suggest the answer is “everyone.” This includes those inside and outside your company. We all live in what could be termed a Wiki-World, where the best answers often come from crowdsourcing (i.e., involving as many interested people as possible, rather than only a handful of experts).

Involve your employees and involve your vendors, as Zappos has with its extranet (Chapter 5), and you’ll have a great start. If you can also involve your customers, that’s even better, with potentially hundreds or thousands of eyes out there helping you find the right direction. While you have your feet up on your desk, or toes in the sand, if you prefer, these stakeholders can be populating your wiki and improving your knowledge base with a remarkable degree of sophistication. Subject, of course, to security and privacy protocols.

the maytag repairman lets you slap him in the facebook

Let’s look at how electronic listening techniques can help to rehabilitate a damaged brand, in this case Maytag. The lamentable backstory: May-tag, that formerly pristine American brand with an iconic lonely repairman, tarnished its nameplate when Whirlpool purchased the brand, moved its manufacturing overseas, and overlaid a service culture that was, shall we say, less than responsive. If that Maytag repairman felt any of his trademark pangs of loneliness in recent years, maybe they resulted from hiding in his office from the mounting complaints and online rants.

Including those of Heather P. Armstrong of Dooce, a much-read blog that’s funny and insightful on a variety of subjects and has a fiercely loyal following. Despite many calls from Armstrong, and many ineffective repair attempts, Maytag continued to prove unable to provide her with a workable clothes washer. She finally called Maytag and warned that she was going to recount the entire experience on her blog and on Twitter. The now-legendary response from the Maytag representative: “Yes, I know what Twitter is, and no, that will not matter.” Armstrong’s exasperated response, on Twitter, to her thousands of followers: “So that you may not have to suffer like we have: DO NOT EVER BUY A MAYTAG. I repeat: OUR MAYTAG EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN A NIGHTMARE.”⁶

To the company’s credit, though, this isn’t where the story ends. Whirlpool/Maytag realized that Twitter did matter, and it responded to Armstrong’s post the way a savvy company would do when confronted with a high-powered critic, sending Jeff Piraino, manager of the executive offices of Whirlpool Corporation in Michigan, to work everything out. (From Ms. Armstrong’s account, he did a splendid job.)⁷

And in a more interesting development, the company instituted a powerful long-term solution: an online listening device. Whirlpool, now the parent company of the Maytag, KitchenAid, and of course Whirlpool appliance brands, realized that the next situation like this should never reach a similar phase of escalation. And that the Heather Armstrongs of the world were potentially the brand’s best friends, most cost-effective focus groups, best crowdsourced product designers, and biggest source of word-of-mouth marketing. So they stopped circling the wagons and shooting back at—or at best ignoring—those outside the wagon train.

Whirlpool set up, monitors, and responds to Facebook pages for its three brands, pages where customers can really let the company have it. Check out, for example, the Facebook page for Whirlpool’s “Discussions” forum (currently the URL is http://www.facebook.com/Whirlpool?sk=app_2373072738; if that’s changed by the time you receive this book, just go to http://www.facebook.com/Whirlpool and click on the “Discussions” link). Discussion topics (actual threads that various customers chime in on) run the gamut:

Big thank you for wonderful, quick customer service

Terrible products

We like our appliances

Disgusted with my Cabrio Washer

Side-by-side fridge dead after six months

Bad experience

These threads help the company address specific complaints and suggestions; as a fringe benefit, concentrating so much Whirlpool brands–related activity in one place improves the company’s SEO (search engine optimization), ensuring that the Whirpool site, rather than Yelp, Complaints Board, or the like, will be what comes up first for its brand names on Google, allowing the company to respond on its own terms. Example: Here’s a typical company response from the “Terrible Products” discussion thread. (Note that Jennifer from Whirlpool is restrained due to the customer’s privacy settings from directly contacting the customer, which is why her response is phrased in the following manner.)

Dear [user name],

I’m very sorry to learn your hot water heater quit working, and I regret to learn of your experience with customer service. I would like to contact you for more information … Please send a message to my personal account with your contact and appliance information.

Thank you,
Jennifer

break it to ourselves more gently

One advantage to encouraging public outpourings, à la Whirlpool or Amazon.com, is that customers stop stewing like they’re sealed inside a pressure cooker. The lid, in effect, has been taken off. Hate something about a product Amazon.com sells?—say something about that product, right there on the Amazon.com site. Amazon.com doesn’t mind; it wants to retain you as a customer, unencumbered by those bad feelings you just let go of.

Of course, most of us aren’t Amazon.com. We have smaller product lines, very dear to our hearts. Most of us aren’t as bold as the Whirlpool brands, either: We would rather handle customer service more discreetly than is allowed by an open and messy airing on Facebook; we would prefer to hear in private about our failings, as I discussed in Chapter 11. Still, we need to listen, because if we don’t hear about issues now, we are going to hear about them later—all over the internet. So if you’re not encouraging public disclosure à la Whirlpool, or à la Amazon.com and its multiple imitators, you still need to publicize methods that customers can use to contact you. Every time a button on your site fails to work, you want your customers to know you’re eager to hear about it via web form or email. When an instruction in your PDF-formatted user’s manual proves too confusing, you want your customer to tell you about it via a live link to your chat operators, embedded in that PDF. Each time a customer in a different time zone receives a shipment from you and has trouble with your product, you sure as heck need to have communication channels open to receive those concerns—or you need to stop shipping to different time zones.

surveying the landscape

Look to get the most out of every communication you send. Many can do double duty by also serving as a listening device. For example: surveys. I touched on surveys briefly above; let’s go deeper. First off, how do you get people to even fill out surveys? At my company, we offer a donation to a relevant charity in honor of every customer who fills out a survey, and at the end of each year we publicize how much has been donated and by how many customers. This approach cuts very well through the marketing clutter. What do you ask on a survey? Of course, you ask what matters to you:

First, the overall impression: Whether customers love doing business with your company. Use whatever words you wish to express this sentiment, but that’s the essence of what you want to find out first. Why ask a question in this vein first? Because if you save it ‘til the end of the survey, the picky little questions customers have answered already on the survey will color how they respond to this all-critical summary question. Note that sometimes this “do you love us” query is best phrased as a cluster of questions, for example:

1. How delighted were you?

2. How likely are you to return?

3. How likely are you to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?

Questions that have operational significance, being sure not to ask them in your own operational jargon; always phrase them the way your customer will have experienced your service. Remember, your customer doesn’t care about—and likely doesn’t understand—your organizational chart and internal terminology, so “How did you feel about our IT department?” or “How do you feel about our catering staff?” are close to meaningless questions. By contrast, “Were the technical issues you encountered corrected to your satisfaction?” or “Was your tray picked up within thirty minutes of you leaving it outside your door?” are meaningful questions.

In addition (and this is the central reason for discussing this here), your survey needs to include multiple opportunities for your customers to let loose, knowing that you’re listening. In addition to answering what you’re curious to know, let your survey subjects tell you what’s on their minds, then get back to each of them personally. This is one of the most effective ways to grow your business, customer by customer, as well as heading off any potential negative escalation.

Okay, I’ve got you listening—on the phone, in surveys, in person. But are you capturing the meat in the responses you receive? If you’re not doing anything long-term and strategic with this data, at the very least do something with it during the course of the customer’s interaction with you. In other words, when a CSR receives a call from a frustrated customer, flags need to go up so that if it’s beyond that CSR’s ability to handle, someone else can step in immediately, and so the situation is followed up on shortly to ensure it was resolved in a way that pleased the customer. If your product or service has a significant time-based element (a contract executed in phases, a product that takes time to ship, a hotel stay), a frustration early in the process needs to be noted and then acted upon later in the stay, with additional kindness and acknowledgment of what was suffered. This real-time element is a significant part of the value that high-quality listening, combined with high-quality systems, can bring to an organization.

But what I also encourage is for you to make use of this information to enhance future visits, calls, and purchases: to ensure continuity and a sense of being remembered for each returning customer. There should be no sense of having to start over for a customer returning to your company. If a customer has to start over each time she works with your company, she may as well start over somewhere else.

Noting information, keeping it at the fingertips of employees involved in a customer interaction, and collating it properly for quick access in future visits are key parts of providing anticipatory service. They’re at the heart of great brands, online or offline, high-tech or otherwise. So what is the information you want to include in a client file? Whatever is important to that client. If a customer shares information with you online (e.g., in the guest’s two hundred character comment made in the course of reserving a hotel room online), have that customer input at the fingertips of your staff. The guest keyed it in, so he expects you to see it. In my business, if a client has won a particular film award at an independent film festival, I know that information matters to him; therefore, it matters to me. It’s noted in his file, and the various staff members who work with him can see that notation, regardless of their position in my company.

It all comes down to not having to reinvent the ear each time a customer interacts with you. Cultivate great people, great online systems, and great self-service, and then collate the data properly. E-listening and plain old classic listening: These are your keys to anticipation.

Now, I offer you my ears. Let me hear from you what you’re missing in your business. What I’ve written here that you need clarified. What you’re seeing out there that’s frustrating or perplexing you. Write to me at [email protected] and visit me at www.customerserviceguru.com for more tips and resources, as well as photographs that illuminate points in this book. Or call me directly on my mobile phone: (484)343-5881. I’m all ears.

“and your point is?”

You’ve hired friendly people, and they’ll be used to working with other friendly people. But not all customers are friendly, all of the time, so provide training that includes classroom-style learning and role-playing and other realistic scenario-driven activities that challenge your employees in the same ways that customers may challenge them on the job.

Your training needs to get across that individual customers are the backbone of business growth. A big part of this is training your team to sense when your customer’s individual shell or force field opens and closes around her: when and when not to venture into the invisible sanctuary within which the customer has expectations of solitude.

Follow the principles of the human force field, using my acronym SMART:

Start

Messages

Adjust

Re-order

Terminate encounter … or not?

Start: The customer expects service to begin the moment she comes into contact with the staff person. In person, a warm greeting should include eye contact and a smile.

Messages: If you can read the messages customers are giving off, you’ll know the level of service they want at any given moment, including “no service needed right now.”

Adjust: Staff members should adjust to the pace of each customer.

Re-order: Even if it inconveniences you, re-order your work activities to suit the customer’s needs. True service should never be slave to checking things off in order on a server’s to-do list.

Terminate: Reseal the protective shell by terminating the encounter … or not? At the apparent end of service, it’s the service professional’s responsibility to ask if anything additional is needed, and, if not, to graciously thank the customer before leaving him in his invisible sanctuary.

An important element of electronic listening is to build “listening devices” into your electronic communications with customers:

• The best automated messaging and FAQ-style self-service include options that allow you to directly reach a human being.

• Online surveys are not only a chance to gather statistical data but also an opportunity to hear from individual customers and to respond quickly.

One of the best areas for enhanced e-listening and for creating anticipatory magic is where the lines intersect between electronic systems and human service, provided you have the two of these working in harmony.

Consider becoming a wiki-friendly company, allowing input from employees, customers, and vendors to bolster your knowledge base.

One advantage to encouraging public outpourings is that customers with negative opinions can stop feeling the frustration of stewing without an outlet.

If you’re not going to encourage public, sometimes negative, disclosure on your sites in the manner of Whirlpool and of Amazon.com and its multiple imitators, you need to publicize methods for customers to contact you directly.

What do you ask on a survey? First (using whatever words you wish to express this sentiment), ask whether your customer loves doing business with your company, and then ask questions that have operational significance. Your survey also needs to include opportunities for your customer to let loose—knowing you’ll respond.

Whether or not in the long run you’re doing anything with the data collected from your listening efforts, at the very least do something with it during the course of the customer’s interaction with you.

If your product or service has a significant time-based element (a contract executed in phases, a product that takes time to ship, a hotel stay), a customer frustration early in the process needs to be noted so you can act appropriately later in the interaction based on this information.

Transcribing information, keeping it at the fingertips of employees involved in a customer interaction, and collating it properly for quick access in future visits are key parts of providing anticipatory service.

Now, I offer you my ears. Write me at micah@micahsolo mon.com for a direct response. Visit me at www.customerserviceguru.com. Call me directly on my mobile phone: (484)343-5881. And thank you.