I am a firm believer that creating an exceptional customer experience is all about people. It is about staff taking the time and effort to understand and appreciate that every customer is different and putting in the time and effort to surprise and delight them. To do this staff need to have the freedom to make decisions and to be able to treat every customer differently.
Recently, a friend of mine shared a story about a bar she used to work in. This bar was part of a national chain and doubled as a restaurant, selling a lot of pub type food. She explained how all staff were given a customer service procedures manual and the manager stood over them making sure they were performing the procedures correctly. These were things like doing their regular customer checks (every 5 minutes and then again on 20 minutes), the order in which they took the customer’s food order and the questions they asked (think “would you like fries with that?”). This story made me cringe as she recalled the fake smiles that the staff wore and the contrived and artificial atmosphere that was created.
Ditch the manual!
As I have said, to deliver exceptional service, staff members need the freedom to be able to adapt to different customers. Procedure driven service lacks warmth, empathy and emotion. Further than this the autocratic management styles that often accompany the procedures, as in the above example, act as a barrier to employee engagement and employees who aren’t engaged in a service will never go that extra mile to surprise and delight customers. Take little Johnny, who happens to be a great people person. His skills are in reading peoples body language to understand their moods and he is great at empathising and building a rapport with people. Which setting would Johnny deliver the best service in, one in which he is told exactly what to say and do, or one in which he is allowed the freedom to express himself?
Service organisations need to trust their recruitment processes to recruit the best people, and if they don’t, they need to revise them. They need to sell new employees the service philosophy to engage them and they need to train them to understand how the service works and the behind the scenes processes that are in place. Then they need to give them room and freedom to work their magic.
Don’t get me wrong, in creating these customer service procedure manuals the services hearts were in the right place. There have been some great conversations lately about personalisation vs consistency in the service experience and there is no doubt that these procedures were designed to achieve consistency. Customers have an abundance of choice, they crave the personal touch and will be loyal to the services that can deliver this because they trust their employees to understand and read their customers moods and expectations. These procedure driven services only allow for basic and not exceptional service.
A personal example
I have recently experienced a really poor service example at the hands of Talk Talk broadband suppiers. I don’t usually like to name and shame but this experience has left me feeling extremely frustrated. I was asked by my Grandmother to go over and help her (attempt) to get her broadband working again. She had already spoken to Talk Talk on the phone but not being technically minded in this Internet age she couldn’t understand what they were asking her to do. When I tried to contact Talk Talk, there was the obligatory long wait on hold before actually speaking to anyone, I didn’t mind this because it has been built into my expectations when dealing with Broadband suppliers. This wasn’t an issue for me, the issue was that because it wasn’t a straight forward problem my Grandmother was experiencing Talk Talk had to do all sorts of tests and had to escalate the problem to different departments. This meant me calling them back several times, because they wouldn’t call me back – they “don’t do that apparently”.
Each and every time I called back I was taken through the same scripted routine and same procedural tests, which I had already done several times with other operators. This was a waste of my time and really irritating. Whenever I tried to tell the operators that I had done these particular checks two, three, four times before they simply ignored me and asked me to go on with the checks. The problem still hasn’t been fixed and my Grandmother has told me if they don’t fix it the next time I speak to them to tell them to disconnected her! She is angry because of how difficult they made it for her to understand, so much so that she had to get me involved. They did offer to send someone round, but it would cost her £100 – quite rightly she wasn’t willing to pay this to fix their problem.
I strongly believe this experience could have been solved, simply by hiring people who have expertise in the subject and who are willing to help people. It is very clear that to save costs Talk Talk have implemented a walkthrough process that any telephone operator can follow. But what the operators can’t do is answer technical questions, diagnose problems themselves or personalise the experience and show empathy for their customers.
I would love to hear your views. Have you had a bad, procedure-driven customer experience? Do I have a misguided trust of employees ability to deliver exceptional service? Or like me, do you believe service organisations need to ditch the manual?
