Biggest Customer Service Blunders

Complaints about poor customer service continue to be heard worldwide. But there are still some businesses that manage to consistently deliver quality customer service. Among the lessons to be learned from such businesses are the common blunders to avoid.

Blunder #1: Making customer service a training issue. Businesses of all kinds invest huge amounts of money in training programs that do not--and simply cannot--work. The function of such training is to identify the behaviors workers are supposed to engage in, and then coax, bully or legislate these behaviors into the workplace. At best, this is almost always a recipe for conduct that feels mechanized and insincere; at worst, it intensifies employee resentment and cynicism.

Instead of dictating what your employees should be doing to delight customers, the better approach is to give your workers opportunities to brainstorm their own ideas for delivering delight. Your role then becomes to help employees implement these ideas and to allow workers to savor the motivational effect of the positive feedback that ensues from delighted customers. This level of employee ownership and involvement is a key cultural characteristic of virtually all flashpoint businesses.

Blunder #2: Blaming poor service on employee "demotivation." Businesses looking for ways to motivate their workers are almost always looking in the wrong places. Employee cynicism is the direct product of an organization's visible preoccupation with self-interest above all else--a purely internal focus. The focus in flashpoint businesses is directed outward, toward the interests of customers and the community at large. This shift in cultural focus changes the way the business operates at all levels.

The reality in most business settings is that employees are demotivated because they can't deliver delight. The existing policies and procedures make it impossible. Instead of "fixing" their employees, flashpoint business set out to build a culture that unblocks them. Workers are encouraged to identify operational obstacles to customer delight, and participate in finding ways around them.