5 Crimes of Customer Care

There are many ways to be a hero for your employer, for your customer, and for yourself when you’re a frontline customer-facing employee. Besides having a thorough understanding of departmental processes and procedures, success almost always boils down to inherently knowing what it means to do the right thing and being consistently respectful and organized. Yet, there are just as many ways to mess things up when you work in a high pressure frontline role and most of the time your employer won’t even notice right away. That’s the scariest part for those smart executives who know their company’s image and brand are often outside their immediate span of control.  They know that the experience felt by paying customers is controlled to a large degree by frontline staff in day-to-day conversations and interactions.

I find this topic so interesting that I wrote a blog post for my employer and you can find it on the Eloqua Blog.  The post is called 5 Crimes of Customer Care and can be found here: http://blog.eloqua.com/5-crimes-of-customer-care/. I’m interested in hearing what you think of it.

Speed hit a bump

I promised when the story first broke that I would continue to follow it.  I may not have to after the announcement this week that the CERN Particle Accelerator may not have been as excited as it was reported to be last September when it was said to have launched neutrinos that galloped faster than the speed of light. Turns out, the results are likely due to a faulty cable.  Talk about anti-climactic.

Albert Einstein can now rest easy, his theory of time still intact. Salman Rushdie can calm his ire over “that speedy Neutrino” turning things upside down, and my friend, Jeff, can stop wondering what will happen with the light shining from his headlights as his car travels at 60MPH.

Content challenges

Is content important?  Of course. But content is only as good as the context within which it sits.  There is a lot of focus these days on the word content, on ways to present information that is compelling, that engages the viewer or listener and (hopefully) influences their purchasing decisions.  But too often the content misses the mark.  It is weak because it doesn’t place the information in a reality that makes personal sense for the participant. Devoid of context (time and place and words and action) the information either sounds bland or condescending.

Recognize this building?

It’s the Freedom Tower rising next to the twin footprints of the decade-long vanished World Trade Center towers.  Yes, it is a crappy picture.  That’s because I took it with an iPhone through the window of an adjacent office building.  I was in NY this week visiting a client and the meeting room looked out over the WTC site.  It made me think about context though because, frankly, aside from its eventual height it doesn’t strike me as a particularly special building.  In fact, the architect who designed the building designed another that is rising in Toronto across the street from where I live and I think that one may end up being a finer  piece of architecture.  At 60 stories, it will be 50 shorter than the Freedom Tower but it will offer a graceful bow of a figure that should truly make it stand out. The Freedom Tower is fine; it will be proudly distinctive on the Manhattan skyline but if you put the building anywhere besides the WTC site, would it be as noteworthy?  I think this is why Dubai doesn’t impress me. The stupendous height and grasping for symbolism seems sad and artificial to me, as if ostentatiousness is the first and only goal.

Then this made me think of other examples where context is important in fully describing what might otherwise be a non-event, an insignificant situation, or a random anyone on the street. In this blog, I return at times to my father and I will again but this time it will be in the company of another father, my wife’s. Two physically short but towering men of character because of their decency, their optimism, the people they loved and who loved them in return. We cannot fully tell the story of an object or a person without knowing where they are from, what inspired them, who and how they touched, why they were who they were.  My two fathers are parts of who I am but it could be argued that if you had not known them you would not know the full me.

Context breathes life into content.

Essays in a social world

I have advice for people who feel overwhelmed by what seems to be an onslaught of information that comes our way from what I’ll call the social media platform.  My word, or words, of advice?  Read longer articles.

Readers of this blog know I’ve been a recent user of Twitter and I can safely conclude after a short 6 months that it is a very useful application.  I’m stunned at how it has replaced for me the daily thorough reading of various newspapers.  In a weird way it has saved me tons of time by allowing me to curate my own content.

However, nothing fires the core of my intellect as does a well-written essay.  I’m an enormous admirer of that writing form in the fashion of icons like Lewis Lapham and Mark Twain and so I look forward to the weekend essay in the Wall Street Journal.  Last Saturday’s was an exceptional capture of most of my life, or at least millions of peoples’ lives across North America.  Crafted exquisitely and building relentlessly towards a conclusion you know in advance but can’t wait to read, pieces like the essay on class divergence in America force your eyes to stay on the page and your brain to stay in the game.

Making the effort can be no effort at all

It doesn’t take much effort at all to show interest and make a friend feel a bit better. All you have to do is drop them an email or make a quick call.  Usually that does the trick unless they are having an especially bad day.  It requires a bit more conscious effort though when the other person is a complete stranger.

I live in downtown Toronto and while it’s fantastic that the city is upgrading its infrastructure (sewers, roads, lighting), the ongoing construction I’m sure is the source of a simmering tension people sense but find difficult to explain. Last weekend I was out walking the dog in the bitter cold in front of our condo building when I noticed a guy adjusting the construction fence that separated the sidewalk from an excavation for a new sewer system.  The fence had been toppled the night before by, presumably, a bunch of guys who’d had their collective spirits and courage raised by alcohol (our street is filled with higher-end bars and restaurants). He was clearly a member of the construction crew there on his day off and he had a big job ahead of him since there must have been about 80 feet of the fence laying on its side. As I walked past him I stopped and remarked that New Year’s Eve isn’t all fun and games. He replied in frustration that he viewed the owners of the establishments as being responsible since they make no effort to stop the vandalism. He wished people would understand that while he understands the frustration that owners have for the mess and noise of the work, ultimately the work is necessary if those owners want their toilets to flush. Good point.

I told him as a resident I appreciated the work and wished him the best for the new year.  He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Hey, thanks man.  That’s good. Same to you.”

Easy.

Three random thoughts unrelated to New Year’s

Three things I read in the last 24 hours made me feel that despite the steady diet of woeful news, we as a world continue to make good progress on a number of fronts. The first is news from Australia that Qantas Airways has implemented a sophisticated RFID-based system that will streamline airport check-in, baggage handling, and boarding to the pleasurable extent that their frequent fliers will probably only have to speak to a human being once, and that’s only if they want to be pleasant that day.  As a frequent flier myself, anything that the airline industry can do to speed the medieval airport experience is good news.

The second thing I read was just today and it was by Richard Shapiro in his blog called Customer Think. Intelligently articulated were his wishes for customer service evolution in 2012.  As someone who has been focused on customer service as a career choice for the better part of 15 years, I found his wishes both inspiring and revolutionary.  Some basic practice changes and senior management support would benefit many companies by providing them with a competitive edge and ultimately, more satisfied customers.

Third, is this..

It’s my home town, Toronto, and it was recently voted as having the 13th best skyline in the world.

http://www.businessinsider.com/best-city-skylines-2011-12#13-toronto-13

NYC and Chicago were the only other North America cities that outranked it.  Why would this image make me feel as if we’re making good progress on something? Because the picture reminds me that a city like Toronto is alive.  Its arts, education, and technology sectors are vibrant and thriving and I’m lucky enough to live in that picture, just inside the right-side edge.  In fact, I wake up to something like this view everyday.

Angst and hope; dinner companions

Got into a good laser-focused conversation on Christmas Day with my sister-in-law on whether our societies are raising people who don’t understand how underlying technologies work for everyday devices, and if that’s true, whether it really matters. How many people can say they had that sort of topic batted around the dining room table over top of the dry turkey and off-color gravy?

Older generations still marvel at take-off that 200 tons of metal and plastic can lift off the runway, the same way they wonder how the small device in their hand is able to connect without wires to someone across the continent.  My sister-in-law and I agreed that the younger generations (under 20) don’t seem to think about these things. Where we diverged is in whether that should provoke anxiety or hope. I’ve long-held the opinion that we should be working towards a world where the devices we use most are the devices we think of least. We’re there with mobile phones (the dumb ones) and we’re almost there with the smart ones too. I compare it to refrigerators, televisions, and automobile engines. When they arrived on the scene, their respective technologies stirred extreme awe and interest. Over time that curiosity waned, to the point now where only highly trained technicians are able open up the back, or hood, and figure out what’s going on. And that, I believe, is as it should be. Being unencumbered by the technical knowledge does not prevent the majority of humanity to benefit from the technical capabilities. My sister-in-law, while acknowledging that, worries that by not encouraging and stimulating a sense of curiosity and desire to look “under the hood”, to want to program a device to do something it wasn’t originally designed to do, we are surrendering our future to those nations that will.  Good point.

Unlike many family conversations across the country that day, this one did not end in bitter words of recrimination and feelings of regret because ultimately, there is no way to foresee the future. Perhaps we are boxing ourselves in and will surrender knowledge completely to those who don’t represent our best interests. On the other hand, technology has exponentially enabled so much more in the last twenty years than even our wildest futurists predicted. The answer is, we just don’t know.