The overlooked consequences of "bad customer" service

Yesterday I more or less wasted 30 minutes at a “Major” department store whose promise to me is “outstanding service is our goal”. How did that happen? Perhaps it was partly because of tight margins and the time of day; it seems the management had arranged that the number of customers eager to buy something outnumbered those eager to make that happen by about 30:1. But that small matter aside, I think most of the waste could be attributed to another case of customer service gone awry involving a “Schemer”, a blender of questionable origin, and a Sales Associate who had been brainwashed that even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, the customer is always right. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

No matter what product or service today, the intensive competition for your and my dollar has driven the mantra that the “Customer is King” to sometimes absurd levels, if you have any doubts watch some of the wildly hilarious Read the mission statement, value proposition or strategic plan of almost any business and somewhere you will find the well-worn statement, “we are committed to making our customers satisfied/successful/healthy/(fill in the blank)”. Many companies and service providers today consider their skills (or unfortunately, lack of in some cases) in providing customer service is the most important factor in setting them apart from their competition.

This almost biblical canon of “customer satisfaction is our most important goal” has been drummed into our brain, and today’s well-informed customer expects, or maybe the better word is “demands”, that the experience of our product or service will exceed any before it. In fact, there is s a good measure of truth behind the value of a happy customer. Numerous studies and research have shown that it is far less costly to keep a customer than it is to find a new one and an unhappy customer is known to tell far more people of his or her “horrible” experience than a happy one. With the newly found power of the Internet, an unhappy customer can soon become your worst nightmare. So while much of our focus today is on keeping the customer happy, little is mentioned of the other equally challenging reasons besides satisfied/dissatisfied that can make a customer difficult.

To anyone who has ever owned or managed a business, worked in retail (may God bless your troubled soul), worked in the hospitality or travel industry or even sold the unwanted remnants of this year’s housecleaning on Ebay, the chance that you have encountered a difficult customer is quite high.

When most of us hear the term “difficult customer”, our first reaction is to think of an angry customer, someone whose expectations have not been met, and whose unhappiness is genuinely linked to the failure or shortcomings of our product or service. In fact those are the ones we can most easily deal with in a systematic and usually successful way, if we follow some basic principles.

1. Make sure you have a system in place to prevent problems to begin with. A legitimate quality control program, employee training and a view of continuously working to improve your products and services are the foundation of any successful venture.
2. Approach the situation as if you where the customer, and show at least some empathy. Would you be happy if you found a fly sharing your Margarita or that your iPod just erased a lifelong collection of your favorite tunes?
3. Don’t personalize the situation. This is of course difficult to do when someone is angrily spouting an explicative laced diatribe in your direction, but your ability to keep your composure will triumph in the end.
4. Reach a common understanding with the customer of what exactly was wrong with your product or service and deal only with solving that issue. The fact that your customer’s newly repaired car just went up in flames on the freeway is good enough reason she is in a bad mood, but there is little you can do about that. You can however replace or repair her charred cell phone.
5. Apologize. The simple words “I am sorry”, while not admitting guilt or cause, can go a long way toward diffusing most rational people’s anger.
6. Fix the problem. If you cannot, or if your employer has not empowered you to do so, find someone who can as quickly as possible. The most annoying and damaging act in the face of any customer complaint is the act of unaccountability.
7. Once a resolution has been reached, ask the customer to acknowledge it. Once the resolution has been acknowledged, offer a small gift as compensation for the inconvenience. A discount on future purchases not only shows your sincerity but also may win you another chance to gain the customer’s confidence.
8. Follow up, if possible, to make sure that the problem was indeed solved. A certain company has won my lifetime loyalty on the back of a well placed phone call asking if their recently repaired product was still working and if I had any further problems.

But what about those equally challenging and difficult customers- the rude “Bullies”, The Schemers, The perpetually Unhappy, and the Cherry Pickers? A prudent application of Pareto’s law will generally show that this small group consumes a disproportionate amount of your efforts and, in the end, are unlikely to bring long term benefits to your business anyway. How to deal with this motley cast of characters?

My experience yesterday was a great opportunity to learn from. Here was an overly polite, but outwardly aggressive mother, bratty child in tow, with a blender that was obviously used and devoid of any packaging, sales receipt or even a hint that it actually was purchased in this store. She of course wanted to, “just return it since it never did work right, and yes, she know the store policy was not to return cash, but they could just credit the price of a new one on her charge card”. Bloody hell! Who in their right mind would expect this to happen? Well, the overworked (and wrongly trained) clerk spent 30 minutes trying to find someone to help make this woman “satisfied” rather than uttering the correct “No way” and kept me, an honest customer, waiting in the process.

The simple answer is you don’t deal with them. Train your employees and yourself as best you can to recognize them and make it known that they are not welcome on your customer list. This is of course far easier to say than to do as you always run the risk that you might have unfairly categorized someone. But if you follow the above steps and you are still confronted with an angry and belligerent face in front of you, the odds are pretty good that you have found one of these unsavory few. And if that is the case, distance you and your business as far from them as quickly as you can. No amount of good intentions or effort will be enough and there is nothing to gain by trying; in fact, you just might lose a “real” customer in the process.