It’s not just what you do that matters. Sometimes the order in which you do things makes a critical difference. This is true in business, as it is in life.
One example from the world of customer service: When you encounter an upset customer, you can:
1 Apologize to a customer.
2 Hear her out at length.
3 Help her find a solution.
These tasks, in this order, work very, very well. But, alternatively, you might:
1 Blurt out your proposed solution right away, rushing the customer to a resolution
…at which point, any attempt to
2 Apologize and
3 Hear her out
will fall on deaf ears.
Both approaches include the same three ingredients. But the results will be worlds apart.
From Micah Solomon – author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.
See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at https://micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”
Learning how to articulate a complaint is one thing, but the receptivity of any frontline staff to your complaint is often very variable because (often poorly paid frontline staff) are a common fallibility in maintaining service quality. I often think that the energy a customer is willing to expend articulating a complaint is often not reciprocated with the courtesy of actually listening and learning something useful from it.
I suspect that the frontline staff, (who may often be bypassed for a manager to direct the complaint to) are not trained to engage in a systematic process of capturing customer feedback (good or bad) on behalf of service management.
As value (or the perception of value) is co-created in a service, not paying attention to these person to person interactions by hiring good people-people and paying them adequately for their skills will inevitably lead to #servicefail (just look at the # on twitter for metrics of how many are recorded there)