WHY I HATE CUSTOMER SERVICE

It’s the phrase itself.

Because it makes customers sound like clapped-out cars going in for a service or a cow being serviced by a bull (remember that next time you feel shafted by a retailer).

Now it’s become a discipline in its own right so we actually have “Customer Service Managers”.

Now isn’t that what everyone in a company should be doing - looking after the customer? But maybe we’re coaching customers to have unreasonable expectations and, in so doing, educating a bunch of hooligans who’ll treat those people selling them stuff unreasonably and rudely.

It leads to mediocrity when a young brand manager, about whom I recently heard, bullied a designer to do a solid week’s work in two days having taken several weeks to write the brief. The design company capitulated because the client company was so important.

Charles Orvis opened a Fishing Tackle shop in Manchester, Vermont in America in 1856. Today, internationally, it has around 1,500 employees. Charles (or one of his successors) said this:
“The customers right even when they’re God-dammed wrong”.

For years I used this with people working for me. But I’m beginning to question it. The subservient role of brand owner this implies is liable to coach a breed of employee who doesn’t think or suggest to their customer that there might be a better way. Worse, it encourages customers to be spoilt brats. Anyone who’s travelled at the front of the plane sees the most outrageous behaviour from the rich and indulged customers, people who behave in a “do you know who I am?” way.

This is all about manners and relationships. We always get the best from each other when we trust each other.

Let’s imagine having an adult relationship with our customers so they don’t feel patronised, short changed or deceived and we actually learn how to do a better job so they get a better deal and we run a better operation. Great customer service - sorry let’s call it “looking after customers properly” - comes from listening, understanding and responding in a grown-up way. This week I read that Waitrose is supporting dementia organisations and is offering personalised shoppers to people with memory problems. That’s grown-up.

But here’s the clincher. Steve Jobs (yes I know - over-quoted and maladjusted when it came to human relationships) said:
 
“people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

Customers are not stupid. But we can make them stupid by never saying “no” and explaining why brilliance takes time and being unprepared to have a grown up conversation with them. Servants don’t answer back but brand owners who behave like servants won’t learn much or last long.

That’s why the wrong, subservient and bland kind of customer service does such a disservice to marketing.

www.colourfulthinkers.com