The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Defending Against Customers
Tuesday - September 27, 2005 03:17 PM in
What happened to "The Customer is Always Right"!
This question, shouted, growled, or grumbled, is likely to mark the very bottom of a bad customer service interaction. The customer wants something, but the company won't give it to him. All other arguments having been exhausted, the customer makes one final appeal: that he is entitled to what he wants simply because he is a customer.
This question, shouted, growled, or grumbled, is likely to mark the very bottom of a bad customer service interaction. The customer wants something, but the company won't give it to him. All other arguments having been exhausted, the customer makes one final appeal: that he is entitled to what he wants simply because he is a customer.
Of course, the reality is quite different. Any organization which grants every customer's whim is likely to quickly go out of business, since customers can be demanding creatures. Customers often want things which are expensive, impossible, unfair, or contrary to the needs of other customers.
So organizations develop defensive mechanisms: ways to deal with unreasonable demands without angering customers or appearing insensitive. Some of these defenses are as unsubtle as the Suggestion Box which gets emptied nightly by the janitor. In other instances, there may be elaborate procedures and review policies which nearly always lead to rejection after months or years of delay.
Every organization does this--it would be impossible to survive otherwise--and the first impulse is usually to reject anything unusual or unprecedented. So customers develop strategies for getting around the defensive mechanisms through persistence, creativity, or creating some appearance of a mass movement.
Tess Thompson in her blog Arch Words wrote about a classic example of this dynamic from her college days. She wanted her dining hall at Penn State to offer blue drinks.
Not for any deep philosophical reason, but just because she wanted to be able to mix drinks in every color of the rainbow. Since all the dining hall offered was shades of red and yellow, her palette was sadly limited.
In a classic example of an organization's defensive mechanism against customer requests, the dining hall invited students to fill out comment cards. One can safely assume that whimsical or outrageous requests--like "Please offer blue drinks"--went straight to the circular file.
I won't give away the ending to the story (go read it yourself), but Tess provides a great illustration of the lengths some customers will go to get around an organization's defenses.
Posted by Peter Leppik
So organizations develop defensive mechanisms: ways to deal with unreasonable demands without angering customers or appearing insensitive. Some of these defenses are as unsubtle as the Suggestion Box which gets emptied nightly by the janitor. In other instances, there may be elaborate procedures and review policies which nearly always lead to rejection after months or years of delay.
Every organization does this--it would be impossible to survive otherwise--and the first impulse is usually to reject anything unusual or unprecedented. So customers develop strategies for getting around the defensive mechanisms through persistence, creativity, or creating some appearance of a mass movement.
Tess Thompson in her blog Arch Words wrote about a classic example of this dynamic from her college days. She wanted her dining hall at Penn State to offer blue drinks.
Not for any deep philosophical reason, but just because she wanted to be able to mix drinks in every color of the rainbow. Since all the dining hall offered was shades of red and yellow, her palette was sadly limited.
In a classic example of an organization's defensive mechanism against customer requests, the dining hall invited students to fill out comment cards. One can safely assume that whimsical or outrageous requests--like "Please offer blue drinks"--went straight to the circular file.
I won't give away the ending to the story (go read it yourself), but Tess provides a great illustration of the lengths some customers will go to get around an organization's defenses.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 03:17 PM by | | | |