I gave the customer service talk to a client’s company today. Between you and me, I killed. I wasn’t sure whether to open with Robert Frost or Swayze’s bar speech from Roadhouse. After seeking the counsel of my elders and wisers, I went with a mashup of both. It was stirring.
Anyway, I had this idea and a concept emerge today while giving the talk. Stay with me for a couple hundred words.
We’ve covered the bad. We’ve covered the exceptional.
That’s the thing about extremes: for better and worse, they get covered. And even when a company stinks up the place, they usually get at least one chance to make good – and that chance, if taken advantage of, tends to get as much coverage as the offense. We do love our redemptions, don’t we?
But what about the rest?
Ugh.
Imagine an inverted bell curve.
At both extremes, you get discussed.
Everyone else – wallowing in the pit of average – gets ignored.
Wait … here … I’ll draw it on a legal pad for you.
Breathtaking, I admit.
There – in the saggy, soggy bottom sits a black hole suck from which it’s hard to escape. I mean, why would you try to escape when you don’t think there’s a problem?
“Our service is fine.”
“We do a pretty good job.”
“Hey, we’re good. When we make a mistake, we always try to fix it.”
Fish don’t know they’re in water.
It’s a dangerous wasteland, my friends. It’s a narcotic malaise that deadens souls of employees, companies and customers.
And it’s true for most of the companies with whom we do business.
Isn’t it?
(Wait … aren’t you an ad writer?? Yes. I’ll tell you what all this has to do with all that tomorrow as we go undercover with our hidden camera. Seriously. My wife doesn’t know about this. She will not approve.)
I think it was Harry Beckwith who wrote that customer service suffered from the ol’ double-whammy of:
1) The Lake Wobbegon Effect, where every child is above average and every company THINKS their customer service is above average
2) The delusion that average customer service is OK
In other words, if you think you have above average customer service, chances are your service is merely average. Plus, we tend to think average is at least OK or respectable, but this really isn’t the case with customer service. And that’s because average customer service kind of sucks.
I think the 2nd part is where people are the most confused, too. That’s because they tend to confuse operational excellence with customer service. Unfortunately, it’s possible to be operationally excellent, to the point where most customers get efficiently and professionally “served,” but still have piss poor customer support for exceptions and screw-ups, or having a fairly sterile shopping and buying experience. A frictionless buying experience is a good thing, but it hardly guarantees the warm and fuzzies, and if you then mishandle a flubbed ball, guess what: you’re customer service is average, which means it sucks!
– Jeff
It was Beckwith! I loved his trilogy – especially the first one. Thanks for sharing.