A conversation I had with a friend brought on some particular important thoughts this morning. He works in IT and understands a bit about why things might not work right…which was the topic of our conversation, since a computer in my office is in constant need of restarting just to get connected for the day. A lot of the computers around here do things like that. They have for a while. And nothing seems to be done besides the occasional tinkering that works for a few days before reverting back to “normal.” And my friend pointed out the unfortunate truth of the matter — “nothing will be done until it pisses the right person off.” We know what that means. It’s got to affect someone “important” enough to matter.
We of less stature must be content to put in our trouble tickets and wait. And we wait. And maybe someone “fixes” it, but they’re usually only treating the symptoms and never tackling the root of the problem. The boss might hear some rumblings. But it isn’t until he finally gets mad enough to march down to someone’s office and say “get it done” before someone pays enough attention.
And it shouldn’t be that way.
There seems to be two main philosophies in customer service. One is what we traditionally expect: we are the customer, and if you want our business, you make the effort to please us. And then there’s the other side of it. We are the customer, but you’ll only maybe get around to helping us out because you don’t really care about our business. Or, as (unfortunately) is the case in government work, it doesn’t really matter if you take care of us or not. We can’t fire you, and our problem is really only secondary to whatever is your own convenience anyway.
Here it is, boiled down: One of these ways is focused on the customer, the other on the provider of the service.
One of the key ingredients to being good at customer service is having the humility of actual service as part of your way of doing things. When you’re focused on yourself, that just isn’t there. While I can’t feign to be the expert in this, I can’t help but think it better to think outward. When it comes to doing your job, you’re serving everyone around you in some way, so you’ve got to have the patience and understanding it takes to swallow some of the…difficulty…you may encounter when you’re dealing with others.
It begins with the person in front of you — whether physically, on the phone, through email, text – however they’re interacting. The key to serving them is to focus on them and handle their situation as quickly as possible. It certainly helps to be good at what you’re doing – knowing how to handle it, and then being able to execute. Nothing should impress a customer more than having their concerns addressed promptly.
I can speak from my own experience. My job involves a lot of customer service, and I always make it a practice to do things right away. For example, if someone discovers they’re not getting paid their language proficiency bonus, the moment I find out I open their record and look at what they should be getting as opposed to what they tell me they’re getting. I ask them to check the remarks section of their pay statement to see if it says anything other than “stop proficiency pay.” I send them the form they need to submit if they indeed should be getting paid but aren’t. In the meantime, I create a file of their scores, and as soon as I get that signed form back, I sign it myself and send the whole package to the person who has to open a case for them to correct the error.
This whole process takes maybe 10 minutes, depending on how fast the person is in getting that form back to me. But if I didn’t respond immediately, it could extend the process by hours, or even days. In the meantime, because I do respond quickly, that’s one thing neither I, nor the person making the claim, needs to worry about. It goes off into another customer service track, and I can only hope that the next person in line works the same way (and, fortunately for me, she does).
I treat people the way I want to be treated. I don’t want to sit around wondering whether my problem is being handled. And I know from experience that if it’s not taken care of right away, it’ll probably sit on someone’s desk or in someone’s queue until I’ve sent a follow-up asking what’s going on. It’s unfortunate that so many people opt for the provider-centered version of customer service, but this is probably one of the world’s biggest problems — the desire to serve oneself over others. It’s a problem I’ve talked about here from a few different angles, but it all comes down to that one thing — it’s all about me. And there’s far too little humility in that…