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20 January 2006
Want better service?
Be a better customer
By Terry Riley
When it comes to customer service, travelers and the companies that
provide them with products and services agree: Great service can send a
travel provider to the top of the heap as fast as crummy service can sink
it. Sure—safety, security, cleanliness, convenience and the like all
count, but when it comes to deciding who are the “best,” the awards almost
always go to the companies that know how to treat their customers.
Accordingly, corporations spend a bundle on customer-service training
programs. Employees learn how to greet their customers, how to respond to
customer requests and how to handle customer complaints. But good
intentions are one thing, success another. We often find ourselves in the
hands of frontline employees of questionable training, uncertain authority
and varying competence. Fortunately, you can increase your likelihood of
getting the best service available by employing some of the same
techniques that the companies use to train their employees—only in
reverse.
All these techniques are based on the same principle: Make your business
transaction more personal by changing your relationship with the employee.
Specifically, you need to behave less like a customer and more like a
friend.
How can you do this? To get some answers to this question, I called upon
experts. Mary Blundell, Director of Service Excellence for Midwest
Airlines, and Jim Coyle, whose New York firm provides quality-assurance
consulting to the hospitality industry, helped me put together the
following pointers.
Adjust your attitude
First impressions are real and influential. If you begin a relationship
with a chip on your shoulder, your attitude will evoke a defensive posture
from the person you are trying to get to help you. After an opening
diatribe, it’s hard to step back and make nice. But a smile and calm voice
can set the stage for a positive relationship, even if the relationship
revolves around a complaint.
Use the employee’s name
There are few things more personal than a person’s name, and the best way
to personalize a relationship is to use it. Addressing a person by name,
particularly by his first name, has the immediate effect of lowering some
of the defenses that all people have in the presence of strangers. Using
an employee’s name also introduces an element of personal accountability
for that employee, who then becomes more invested in the success of the
transaction.
Ask for a supervisor(?)
This is a tricky one, as the usual advice to ask for a supervisor, who may
have more authority to help you, can easily backfire. It depends on your
reason for asking. If you speak to a supervisor to praise the job that an
employee is doing for you, you can expect good treatment. But if you want
a supervisor to overturn an employee’s decision or action, you may be in
for a surprise. More often than not, the supervisor will support her
employee. After all, she and the employee must work together long after
you’ve disappeared from the scene.
Slip ’em a tip
For the most part, nominal tips are expected and appreciated by people in
the service industry, and they can help keep you in good favor with them.
But tipping is a delicate matter, and overtipping can actually work
against you. For one thing, an extravagant tip can cause resentment among
the recipient’s coworkers, making his job more difficult. More
importantly, heavy tipping reintroduces business into the personal
relationship you are trying to foster. What’s worse, your generosity may
be interpreted as condescension. So be careful.
Short answer? Be nice. If you simply allow yourself to be friendly and
congenial, a relationship will develop on its own that will better serve
both you and the employees whose job it is to provide service.
© 2006 Applied Psychology
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