"GOOD EVENING SIR AND MADAM" OR "HI GUYS"?

I’m constantly hearing Boards talking about customer service and the need for excellence in this area. At the same time I think customer service is getting worse and worse; partly because everyone is getting very confused. In some ways customer service is the last arena of class warfare.

We were at Claridge’s recently at a splendid 60th birthday celebration. It was utterly wonderful and at every point the customer service was perfect. Everything happened at an intuitively right, prompt but not rushed pace. The waiters were charming and alert. The two waiters serving champagne at the beginning were young and with that assured level-gazed smile which suggested they actually knew just how good they were at what they did and they were enjoying us enjoying ourselves.

It’s all to do with training. Not training in process but training in attitude. Everyone at the hotel wanted us to have a good time. They were focused on us not on themselves.

On Saturday in the Times Giles Coren reviewed the restaurant Pachamama. It had the worst room, menu design, lighting, attitude and service on any restaurant he’d ever been to. It also had unbelievably good
cooking. He described its customer service like this:

 “It could only have made a worse first impression if someone had headbutted me on the way in.”

But you can see the problem. Very modern cool waiting staff full of their “guys”, “chill” and “whatever’s”. Nice but desperate to show they weren’t serving as such, nothing so demeaning as that. At Balliol College, Oxford they used to call this “effortless superiority”. I think I’d call it “casually indifferent”.

At this same Claridges “do” a retired doctor I sat next to described the brilliant service she and husband had received from a travel agent - “call me any time” he’d said (so why is that unusual?) and the trip to Asia they’d been on during which she’d concluded Britain had become “a post-work society”.

The reality about Pachamama is that no one front of house seemed to have concluded good service requires good listening skills, a keen sense of observation, speed of response and never ever relaxing. When Orvis the fishing gear and outdoor equipment retailer said:

“The customer’s right even when they’re Goddamned wrong”

I gave him 100% for attitude but only 50% for marketing. Stroppy, drunk or rude customers sometimes need to be ejected when they are that wrong. And anyway when customer service is flawlessly attentive customers tend to behave well too. Witness the brilliantly trained and modern service in any Corbyn and King establishment - the Wolseley and others.

Making other people happy and solving their problems should be a joy not a chore.  So long as we fail to coach people in being able to understand what others are feeling then we’ll never create the nation of great customer servants that a service economy needs. Servant? What’s your problem? Civil Servants never seemed to have one.

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

THE CUSTOMER IS RIGHT EVEN WHEN THEY ARE GOD DAMNED WRONG

That’s what Charles Orvis said - he who founded the legendary high-end fishing, hunting and outdoor retail and mail order business. Most of us have taken this pretty well for granted as the byword in customer service. Marketers worldwide have sought to meet what they think theirs customers want. If Fawlty Towers is the paradigm of how not to do it then Orvis is the complete opposite.

But then along came Steve Jobs to turn all the arguments on their heads with his refusal to do consumer research and with a fixed view on the need to create consumer needs rather than just fulfil them.

The trick is surely to give the customer what they hadn’t imagined they’d wanted but when they get it they realise it’s exactly what they wanted all along.

It’s the Heston Blumenthal trick.

Which brings me to NatWest. I bank with them and I like them. Their refurbished branch in Brighton is well run, smart and with bright and charming staff. (Yes boys and girls this is a a bank not a fairy story although being Brighton there are eccentrics around.)

Well they get a bit busy in there so they introduced a ticketing system whereby rather like in the delicatessen area of Waitrose you’d get say ticket 345 and seeing that there were 20 people ahead of you you’d go for a coffee, do some shopping and then come back and lo and behold you were now five away from the head of the queue. Great idea? Well they’ve canned it. The staff in the bank are disappointed because it made their life easier and more ordered and I am as mad as hell. Why did it go? “Customer survey,” I’m told “they did a survey and our customers didn’t like it”.

So Nat West has gone back to a system we all like – queuing in hope and ignorance in a long line.
Either the research methodology was wrong or they asked the wrong customers or they are lying and merely want us to give up and bank online.

I’d have asked the staff not the customer- day by day they feel the pulse of their customers. If the staff preferred the system that’s been abandoned maybe it was because they understood the effect it had on customer behaviour whilst the research only asked about customer attitude. Customer attitudes would, incidentally have shown that most people have been conditioned by the media, politicians and the economic crash to hate bankers. That’s their attitude towards them. This does not mean they want them to shut up shop and commit suicide.

In Room 101 recently Joan Bakewell said how she loathed customer surveys especially the kind that ask “were we good, very good or excellent?”

Agreed. But I’d go further. Most customer research perversely tells you the wrong things because (would you believe) customers don’t actually know what they want any more than patients in hospitals do.

Except to be made better and that’s our job.

Be nice to your customers, listen to them but be firm about giving them what they need (really, really need) not what they say they think they want.