Five Customer Service 'Worst Practices' and What You Can Do To Avoid Them

[Originally published in Forbes.com. Written by Micah Solomon, an author, keynote speaker, and consultant on customer service, customer experience, and company culture. Reach Micah by email or phone, 484-343-5881, or visit his website.] 

Customer service is more than just common sense. It’s not always easy to pull off, and it's certainly not something that “just takes care of itself” (although I’ve heard each of these sentiments voiced at one time or another, in my work as a customer service consultant). To my eye, customer service is a nuanced art that benefits from philosophy, planning, and practice. As a result, much of my work is aimed at get these foundational issues and nuances right, in the interest of creating a truly superior customer service experience.

However, there are some parts of delivering great customer service–or, more accurately, avoiding poor customer service–that are straightforward, easy to fix, and high-impact. Here, I’ll highlight five of these customer service “worst practices” and provide an achievable solution for each that can get your customer service back on track.

Worst Practice #1: Failing to acknowledge customers when they come within eye-contact range. Customer service has to start at the moment that the customer comes in contact with an employee; it can’t wait for whenever the employee finally chooses to be in contact with a customer. In other words, if a customer is aware that an employee is nearby, that employee needs to acknowledge the nearby customer, or the customer will feel disregarded.

Solution: Practice and enforce the 10-5 rule. When a customer comes within ten feet, acknowledge them; at five feet, greet them. The ten-foot acknowledgement can be a smile and eye contact (a massive improvement on intentionally avoiding eye contact, which so many employees do, either from natural shyness or from fear of getting roped into doing extra work). The greeting at five feet can be a time-of-day greeting (“Good Morning,”) or something similar.

Caution: Please don't overreact to this recommendation by encouraging employees to start actively interrupting customers. If a customer is engrossed in their phone, etc., never force interaction upon them; doing so is just as bad customer service as ignoring them.  

Worst Practice #2: Making customers go to more than one employee for assistance, because they started with the “wrong” employee.

Customers shouldn’t have to learn your company’s organizational chart in order to get assistance, and at great companies, they don’t. At a superb healthcare institution like Mayo Clinic, if a family member is in distress about how their loved one’s treatment is going and asks, say, someone in housekeeping for help, that housekeeper will get the help they need. This doesn’t mean the housekeeper is going to consult on surgery or on discharge instructions, but it does mean they’ll say, “absolutely I can help you with that,” and then find you someone who can help, rather than you having to conduct the search yourself. The same is true at any great hotel; they don’t expect a guest to know who the right person in the organization is to take care of a particular request; rather, whichever employee receives a customer request figures out how to get it taken care of, seamlessly and without inconvenience to the guest.

Solution:  Make it one of your central, publicized, enforced customer service tenets that the employee who receives a customer request owns that customer request.

Worst Practice #3: Disciplining an employee in front of customers.

A customer should never—never!—be burdened with witnessing or overhearing a manager disciplining or correcting an employee. It’s an interruption and awkward situation for the customer; it increases the employee’s embarrassment; and you—the manager—can’t really know how this little vignette will ultimately play out (for example, will the employee push back—still in public—against your discipline, causing even more of a scene?)

Solution: Keep such interactions behind the scenes. Although correcting employee errors immediately is an important way of improving employee behavior, you’ll need to fudge the definition of “immediate” enough to ensure that any correction or discipline occurs out of sight and earshot of your customers. Here’s how a great Five Star (double Five Star, actually, for lodging and food) hospitality professional, Patrick O’Connell, proprietor of The Inn at Little Washington, pulls this off:

"Corrections are needed constantly in service, but they have to be done with discretion. If I observe a behavior that needs correcting, I’ll signal that I need to speak with [the employee in question] for a quick second–but never if a guest could witness this or overhear. We have a little corridor off the dining room and in the corridor is an elevator; I push the button, and we go in and talk. It’s unacceptable to perform a correction in front of a guest, but it also doesn’t work to wait ‘til a monthly meeting when neither of us is going to really remember exactly what transpired."

Worst Practice #4: Pointing fingers when a problem arises.

This similar to the problem above, and just as unacceptable. When something goes wrong, don’t make your company look even worse by rolling around in the muck.

Solution:  The solution here is both linguistic and conceptual. Teach employees that the company is “we”—“we messed up,” “we dropped the ball on that,” or even “I,”, but never “they.” Even if the problem originated outside the company, there’s value in moderating the language your customers use, most importantly by not bothering to assign blame externally and, if it is necessary, to do it as gently as possible (not “Fedex dropped the package off to us late” but “looks like there was a delay in receiving the package here.” )

Worst Practice #5: Making customers feel like an interruption. While it’s true that that being able to interact with your friends at work is a big part of what makes work tolerable (and, I hope, enjoyable), when a customer wants an employee’s attention, it’s important that they don’t feel like an interruption, or like outsiders who are being excluded from an inner circle or secret society.

Solution: Set, model, and enforce the following practice: Not only must employees stop talking when a customer wants their attention, they need to use their peripheral vision—and other senses–in order to halt such conversations at least a moment prior to when a customer might realize they were on a potential collision course with an existing conversation.

Credit where credit's due: Customer service thought leader Bill Quiseng – well worth following at @billquiseng – helped craft some of these scenarios with me.--Micah

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, speaker on customer service, customer experience, culture, innovation, hospitality, leadership. [email protected] - 484-343-5881