CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR MANAGERS
Copyright 2011 by Paul Wallis
Smashwords edition
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction and a bit of general cursing
Chapter 1: The mindset that kills: “Screw the customer!”
Chapter 2. First rule of management- “Watch your back”
Chapter 3. Poison on legs, or career makers? Customers as a part of daily life
Chapter 4. Customer Service Manager, or how to become a Marine Drill Instructor
Chapter 5. Customer Service Training- Absolutely critical
Chapter 6: Handling the disasters
Chapter 7. Staff Morale and working conditions
Chapter 8. Criteria for success or failure
Chapter 9: The Blue Chip Customer- The marketer’s best friend
Introduction and a bit of general cursing.
Ah, customer service. The lambs are prancing in the meadows as the sun shines, and scantily clad nymphs are playing harps as the rivers of gold flow majestically to executive Lotus Land.
Like hell.
The rabid dogs are raging in the industrial wasteland, and the undead are filing lawsuits as designer suit-clad urine samples stab you in the back while the sewers overflow, usually all over your desk.
If you’re in management, you believe it when you see it, not before, and you don’t buy any bull about anything until it’s audited and someone’s signed off on it.
In customer service, you’re a bit less idealistic than that, if you’re thinking of having a career in management, a life, and other little details.
About me: I have 20 years experience in customer service, at the bottom of the coal face, and this book comes from the heart.
I’ve dealt with people in just about every state of mental misery as a result of customer service situations.
I’ve supervised people trying to do their best in customer service with baying accountants and foaming at the mouth lawyers raging at them.
I was a frontline phone inquiries clerk in a government agency which was getting sued on the basis of phone advice.
So I do know what an aggressive client base is. They don’t say it with guns; they say it with lawsuits and anything else which is expensive and time consuming.
I also know what goes wrong in customer service, and why it happens.
These days I’m a professional writer. The legacy of my customer service days is that I don’t expect anyone to read non-information, or cutesy crap about “good outcomes”, and “empowering” any damn noun in a text.
There are quite enough insults to humanity in the world of management science without me starting up a few more.
This book is about a business mindset which has to change.
Lousy customer service is trashing the business sector. It’s costing billions.
The standards of business practice which are tolerating poor customer service are also tolerating:
Dangerous legal situations, each one worth any amount in damages.
Lost business because some idiot won’t spend time with a client, anyone’s guess what that’s worth.
Extremely expensive marketing, sabotaged from day one by hopeless service to clients.
Disconnected warning systems, because customer feedback isn’t being heard. This makes headlines on a daily basis.
This is nothing more or less than a slopfest.
Also to the point, this is supposed to be business.
Businesses are paying for the privilege of a business culture which has never really been taught the importance of customer service.
Worse, a sort of cultural fungus of issue evasion has developed. The wrong sort of legalisms have been allowed to fester.
The business equivalent of Candida albicans (thrush) is a mentality where the people paying the money that drives the business don’t matter. The result is a nasty, costly, rash, and some very uncomfortable, often risky, business and legal situations.
How many avoidable situations with clients have you seen? Things that never needed to happen, that used up incredible amounts of time, very expensively, and achieved nothing? Maybe even cost market share, or lost it completely?
If you’ve been alive sometime in the last 50 years, it’d be quite a few.
How much money do you feel like losing because you don’t have any real grip on your customer situations?
When does “out of control” become “out of business”?
When does “manager” become “manager with albatross around neck”?
So- By the light of a few burning management consultants, read on.
Chapter 1: The mindset that kills: “Screw the customer!”
Customer service, globally, is a lousy joke. It’s beyond pitiful, it’s execrable.
Ever since management science gave up on actual management, and tried to turn itself into something that looks nice and smells great on spreadsheets, Cosmetic Management has been the order of the day.
That doesn’t work in customer service.
With “customer” comes anything, and anybody, with any possible reaction to a situation.
With “service” comes liabilities, serious risks, and a lot of them.
This is the law Murphy was too much of an optimist to make when he wrote Murphy’s Law.
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” is hilarious, compared to “Anyone who can screw anything up will find a way of costing you a fortune”.
There’s nothing cosmetic about it.
You can’t Maybelline a class action or a lawsuit away.
You can’t mouthwash away civil liabilities, insurance situations, bad press, regulators with reams of violations, or lost clientele.
The bottom line has a nasty habit of making a noose out of itself, in any business, and customer service contains a lot of ways of tying the noose.
Forget every single bit of whatever you’ve been told is “good enough” in customer service. It isn’t, and it never has been.
The basic mindset of modern customer service management is Screw The Customer, as far as the customers know. They don’t have a lot of reason to think otherwise.
It was developed by talentless idiots for distribution to even dumber people as part of a comprehensive program of high-priced disinformation for management started in the 1980s. It may even have been a form of attempted neutering of management.
The theory is that customers can’t do much about shoddy service, goods, or anything else. So refunds, good service, basic consumer laws, and other trivial things are allowed to rot, because it’s cheaper.
The beauty of this theory is that it’s entirely wrong.
And it’s a lot more expensive.
Put it this way:
A homicidal nutcase with a gun can only kill you.
An infuriated customer can give you decades of very expensive grief, if they know how, and many do. Get anyone annoyed enough, and they’re capable of anything, and will be after you for years.
Much of the legal industry’s less publicized work is settlements, and many of those settlements are customers who’ve known how to create very difficult situations for businesses, to the extent it’s better to settle than to contest.
Another joy is extreme negative publicity: Always fun for your competitors, and guaranteed to get your customers looking at their accounts after they hear about a problem you’ve had with something vague, like providing the service they’re paying you to provide.
Then there’s the good old “You’re uninsurable” reaction from your insurers when your product’s various defects make headlines or your customers tend to be dead more often than not. Up go the premiums, up go the overheads.
If this were fiction, it’d be funny. These are just regular headlines, nothing particularly exotic.
The Screw the Customer mentality usually results in the Screwer becoming the Screwee, sooner or later.
It’s no coincidence.
Stupidity is one of the few universally recognized bad risks, even in business.
In many cases, businesses have come to billion dollar grief on the basis of a few dollars’ worth of merchandise or services, or just bad advice.
The whole problem began when someone decided that greed was good, and squirreling away those few bucks was a license for anything. If you were a customer service manager, you got a pat on the head and as much hay as you could eat.
Greed isn’t good, it’s expensive, and costs always get passed on.
As a manager, it can cost you your job.
Your position puts you on Death Row if things go wrong. Screw the Customer means playing with fire. If it works, you lose a customer. If it doesn’t work, you’re the bunny.
Lose enough customers, you’re dead.
Get too many complaints, you’re dead.
Attract bad publicity, you’re dead.
Find a good way of incurring a massive liability, you’re dead.
See what I mean about this mindset?
It’s for idiots. 100% certified idiots.
It has to go, because as both a supplier and as a consumer, it hits you both ways. Your business, (as you will just possibly have noticed) also gets “varying standards of service”, meaning everything from Stone Age to indictable.
You know what that costs you.
In fact, have a look at the amount of time your business spends on just fixing service issues, and you can put an actual dollar figure on that.
Your competitors also provide wonderful, wholesome, El Crud-brand services, as refugees from their business will have told you. They’re sitting ducks for anyone in your industry prepared to provide better service.
There are real opportunities in customer service for some very good business indeed. You need to know your stuff, and you need to know your market, but you’ll have already guessed where you can take this.
Chapter 2. First rule of management- “Watch your back”
If you’re a top level manager, customer service is your problem, and you’re well within your rights to get involved and fix it. You’ll be able to show results, and maybe even get some sleep.
If you’re a middle manager, it’s a situation where you can really achieve something useful, and make a meaningful career move, if you can fix it. With any luck, higher management will see your point, and give you some time and space for your ideas.
Which is nice to know, but bear in mind that in customer service management, unless you’re in top management, you’re able to get flak from both directions.