Customer Service - Companies vs Customers

I have worked in the IT field for over a decade and a half with a focus on Help Desks. I began my career installing hardware and software in the military for the Commanding General and his staff at Fort Riley. Customer service was an absolute and as a soldier I was already conditioned to do what I was told when I was told and without thought or question. When I left the military, I began working for a major company on their IT Help Desk. I answered calls and herded them where they needed to go if I could not resolve them in a “timely” manner. Customer service was not as important, although it was treated like it was. The focus was on how many calls we could take, how fast we could fix them and did anyone call back to complain. I slowly moved my way up to the title of Tier 2, then Trainer and then supervisor. I was eventually the Tier 2 supervisor. I learned about ITIL standards and how tickets and calls work. I was sent to different training programs focused on management and metrics.

After several years, I moved on to work for the government as a Help Desk Manager. That is when I began to realize that my whole career, my whole life, I was never truly trained on what a customer wants or expects. I began reading books and articles on customer service. I also began asking my customers what they wanted and even went as far as to ask strangers in various stores what they thought about customer service. Some people looked at me like I was crazy, but most were very open and provided me with great input.

The term Customer Service gets thrown around a lot with the expectation that everyone knows what it means. However, anyone who has called a “Customer Service” line for help will tell you that Customer Service is slowly but surely vanishing off the face of the planet. At the same time, all the big companies keep creating commercials and posting false narratives online that suggest they have 96-99% Customer Approval rating. Obviously, there is a discrepancy between what customers and companies see as “Customer Service”.

From my own experiences as well as discussing with many other people I found that a customer and a company absolutely view customer service differently. No matter what any legal scholar will tell you, corporations and companies are not humans. Humans, for the most part, are empathetic creatures that base things off how they feel, how they are treated. Companies are more in line with robots. They do not feel.  They do not care. They are like terminators that have one goal. Profit. People that work for companies are human, however, their humanity gets gobbled up by the company they work for. A good example I recently found involves Toms Shoes.

Toms Shoes was started about 10 years ago by Blake Mycoskie. The premise of the company was simple. They would give away one pair of shoes to a child in Africa for every pair of shoes that was sold. Sounds like a company that cares! A closer look reveals something slightly different. A closer look shows that this was more than likely just a ploy to give the shoe company an advantage. Sure, Blake is likely a great person who wants to help. But, companies are not people. They want to make money. Here is a simple analogy that compare humans and machines.

Humans need water, food and oxygen to live. If you take away any of these things they will die. Humans will do whatever they need to do to survive. History is replete with examples of this to include cannibalism, genocide, and even more egregious and unthinkable atrocities. Companies need money to survive. You would be hard pressed to find any company that can sustain itself without making a profit. I am sure there are some very strange examples out there but for the most part, no money, no company. In the last decade, we have seen an increase in jobs outsourced overseas to save the company money. Well, that’s how they word it when they are letting American workers go. They are not saving money; they are increasing their EBITA. I have seen this first hand. I worked at a company in which made a profit in the tens of millions of dollars in one year, that is profit. However, the goal was a few million more than what they made so no one got a bonus and a few short months later they outsourced the entire Customer and Technical Support jobs to the Philippines. The company did this with no regard to who they let go. In fact, they laid people off in an assembly line fashion, calling them one by one to a room and then immediately escorting them off the premises so as not to impact day to day activities.

Fade back to Toms Shoes. Vox.com wrote an article about how Toms Shoes was not helping by giving away shoes, in fact, it was hurting. By giving away shoes they were causing local shoe shops to lose business. An even bigger flaw in the company’s conscience, or lack thereof, is that starving children would much rather have food than shoes, or toilets, clothes, medicine. Why shoes? Who in Africa said, “Geez, I sure wish people would give us shoes instead of blankets or food.” Just to cement my point here, Blake recently did an interview with Business Insider and said in regards to stepping down “Bain did not invest in us because they thought it was charity. They invested in us out of a fund, and they expect to get the same returns that they promised their partners. They see our giving and our purpose as a competitive advantage.”

Customers voice their opinion on which company is providing the best service by which products they buy. Companies showcase how well they are doing by manipulating numbers that they themselves gather and then show to the public without any type of external vetting.

A company views “Customer Service” as the following;

§ Speed of answer – How quickly the phone is answered

§ Up selling – The ability to sell things the customer did not come to buy

§ Cost per call – How much money are they spending per call and how much money they are making per call

§ Mean time to resolution – How long on average does it take to close a ticket created by a customer

§ Number of complaints – How many times a complaint is filed against an agent (Caveat – A lot of times agents work closely together and so complaints may not be filed)

Companies are there to make profits. If making people happy makes them more money they will do that, but only at the barest level. There are various other metrics that companies use but the ones above are the most common. After reading the above list to you get a warm fuzzy feeling? I do not.

A customer views “Customer Service” as the following;

Friendly demeanor

People want to be treated with respect and courtesy. Customers also know when you are being fake or phony and that will cancel out all the good quickly. The first step for any company that wants to improve their customer service is to change how they treat their own employees. A happy employee will naturally be more friendly whereas an underappreciated or unhappy employee will absolutely pass that on to the customer.

I met a young man named Thomas in a supermarket one day. He was looking through the various types of meats presumably deciding on what to grill over the glorious weekend when I asked him what his thoughts on customer service were. He gave me a short answer that stuck with me. He said that he had been trying to decide on what to eat at a fast food restaurant and asked the cashier what was good. The cashier told him it was all good and if he could please pick something because there was a line forming. He said that was not customer service. If they had smiled and maybe selected a couple of different entrees and said something good about them, that would have been nice. He said he had not been back in a couple weeks just because of her demeanor.

I truly believe that her answer to his question was more than likely due to the values that the company had instilled in her. The value that fast is the best form of customer service. Sure, when you go somewhere to eat, you want prompt service, but fast and prompt are not the same thing. Fast is factory line. Prompt is more in the realm of greeting the customer when they walk in and letting them know you are helping another person and will be with them as soon.

Thoroughness

Have you ever gotten off the phone with someone from customer service just to realize that you had to call them back because they did not finish whatever it was you were working with them on? That can be so very frustrating. I understand that working in a call center can become mind numbing at times, but it is not too hard, at least in my opinion, to ask politely if there is anything else someone needs help with prior to concluding the call. The real problem is that companies measure the amount of time their employees spend on the phone and tend to reward people that can get off the phone faster. The term they use is average call duration or ACD.

As people, we tend to want to finish things. This is known as the “Zeigarnik Effect”. This effect is why a waiter or waitress can remember what you ordered until you pay, then they let it fall right out of their brain. Companies use this to their advantage. They set up metrics and goals that allow our brains to sidestep this effect. As people, we also like to meet our goals because we know that if we do not, something bad may happen. This is something we are taught since birth. It is ingrained into our being. Do your chore before Dad gets home. Turn in your homework before class starts. Sound familiar? Well, what happened to do your chore well or take your time and make sure your homework is complete and correct? When you have two competing goals, the easier one is the one we focus on. If your goal is to have an ACD of 5 minutes and to take care of the customer’s needs, which one sounds easier? Sometimes you can do both, but when you start approaching that 5-minute mark, well, I have seen firsthand how normally great people will shoot for hitting the easy goal and not be as thorough as they could be.

What is the solution then? It’s quite simple. Be wary of what goals you set up and try not to make them contradict each other.

To be heard, to be a part of something

People are all the same yet completely different. We all believe we are unique and can make things better. In fact, we strive to make things better. Customers do not want to just show up and buy something. If given the chance, they want to tell a company how they could do things better. Unfortunately, companies tend to not listen. This is a top down problem for most companies. Management makes decisions and everyone else does what they are told. Decisions and ideas flow from the top to the bottom and rarely the other way around. This type of thinking keeps the creative ideas that customers have from moving back up. When a customer does have a great idea, there is no path for it to reach the top and thus employees generally don’t care what the customer thinks.

Companies will use surveys or send questionnaires to customers to gather “feedback” from time to time. This is not a real interaction. This takes the creativity and spontaneity out of everything and does not make a customer feel like they are a part of something. Have you ever filled out a survey and then thought, wow, I was just a part of that?

I have worked at a little liquor store part time for several months to help family friends that for various reasons needed some trustworthy people to fill in here and there. I saw something special there. I saw an owner who listened to her customers. This tiny little store made money even though it was in the middle of nowhere and had competition from restaurants, bars and other liquor stores all around it, and no, she did not use surveys. She instilled in every employee that worked there to listen to the customer. She told everyone to keep a notepad near the register and to write down anything the customer asked or suggested. She even allowed staff to make small changes and rewarded not only staff if something worked right, but customers as well. If a customer suggested a new type of drink and it sold well, she would give that customer a couple free bottles to say thank you.

I started writing this because I was getting frustrated with the lack of sympathy that companies provide when you call them over the phone but then it turned into something a little bit more. It turned into an opportunity for me to improve my ability to provide good customer service and to pass that on to my team. What I learned while writing this has already helped me and my team.