This book was written after many years in customer service, watching what worked, what didn’t work, and how easy it was to create problems. It’s intended as a thought piece rather than formal customer service training, obviously, but it works. The more you think about what you do, the more you learn and evolve your methods.
Customer service, globally, is a lousy joke. It’s beyond pitiful, it’s execrable.
Ever since management science gave up on actual management, and tried to turn itself into something that looks nice and smells great on spreadsheets, Cosmetic Management has been the order of the day.
That doesn’t work in customer service.
With “customer” comes anything, and anybody, with any possible reaction to a situation.
With “service” comes liabilities, serious risks, and a lot of them.
This is the law Murphy was too much of an optimist to make when he wrote Murphy’s Law.
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” is hilarious, compared to “Anyone who can screw anything up will find a way of costing you a fortune”.
There’s nothing cosmetic about it.
You can’t Maybelline a class action or a lawsuit away.
You can’t mouthwash away civil liabilities, insurance situations, bad press, regulators with reams of violations, or lost clientele.
The bottom line has a nasty habit of making a noose out of itself, in any business, and customer service contains a lot of ways of tying the noose.
Forget every single bit of whatever you’ve been told is “good enough” in customer service. It isn’t, and it never has been.
The basic mindset of modern customer service management is Screw The Customer, as far as the customers know. They don’t have a lot of reason to think otherwise.
It was developed by talentless idiots for distribution to even dumber people as part of a comprehensive program of high-priced disinformation for management started in the 1980s. It may even have been a form of attempted neutering of management.
The theory is that customers can’t do much about shoddy service, goods, or anything else. So refunds, good service, basic consumer laws, and other trivial things are allowed to rot, because it’s cheaper.
The beauty of this theory is that it’s entirely wrong.
And it’s a lot more expensive.
Put it this way:
A homicidal nutcase with a gun can only kill you.
An infuriated customer can give you decades of very expensive grief, if they know how, and many do. Get anyone annoyed enough, and they’re capable of anything, and will be after you for years.
Much of the legal industry’s less publicized work is settlements, and many of those settlements are customers who’ve known how to create very difficult situations for businesses, to the extent it’s better to settle than to contest.
Another joy is extreme negative publicity: Always fun for your competitors, and guaranteed to get your customers looking at their accounts after they hear about a problem you’ve had with something vague, like providing the service they’re paying you to provide.
Then there’s the good old “You’re uninsurable” reaction from your insurers when your product’s various defects make headlines or your customers tend to be dead more often than not. Up go the premiums, up go the overheads.
If this were fiction, it’d be funny. These are just regular headlines, nothing particularly exotic.
The Screw The Customer mentality usually results in the Screwer becoming the Screwee, sooner or later.
It’s no coincidence.
Stupidity is one of the few universally recognized bad risks, even in business.
In many cases, businesses have come to billion dollar grief on the basis of a few dollars’ worth of merchandise or services, or just bad advice.
The whole problem began when someone decided that greed was good, and squirreling away those few bucks was a license for anything. If you were a customer service manager, you got a pat on the head and as much hay as you could eat.
Greed isn’t good, it’s expensive, and costs always get passed on.
As a manager, it can cost you your job.
Your position puts you on Death Row if things go wrong. Screw the Customer means playing with fire. If it works, you lose a customer. If it doesn’t work, you’re the bunny.
- Lose enough customers, you’re dead.
- Get too many complaints, you’re dead.
- Attract bad publicity, you’re dead.
- Find a good way of incurring a massive liability, you’re dead.
See what I mean about this mindset?
It’s for idiots. 100% certified idiots.
It has to go, because as both a supplier and as a consumer, it hits you both ways. Your business, (as you will just possibly have noticed) also gets “varying standards of service”, meaning everything from Stone Age to indictable.
You know what that costs you.
In fact, have a look at the amount of time your business spends on just fixing customer service issues, and you can put an actual dollar figure on that.
Your competitors also provide wonderful, wholesome, El Crud-brand services, as refugees from their business will have told you. They’re sitting ducks for anyone in your industry prepared to provide better service.
There are real opportunities in customer service for some very good business indeed. You need to know your stuff, and you need to know your market, but you’ll have already guessed where you can take this. This is about how you do that.
