During college I majored in Psychology and minored in Business, and during that time I was a store manager for a clothing store. In retrospect, one thing I noticed was that my business classes did not teach me how to interact with people.
I learned about how to increase the "bottom line", marketing, and accounting, but what was lacking in my education was the psychology of business...what drives us to to do business with a particular company - or even more important - how we can create loyal customers. I vaguely remember one of my professors touching upon the idea of customer loyalty in a business management class, but obviously I didn't learn anything significant because I barely remember any of the curriculum. In fact, everything I learned about business was through experience.
Even when I was training as a manager, all I learned was how to increase sales through promotions and how to merchandise a store to inspire people to buy. Yes, I was taught about "customer service", but I was given a script for every complaining customer. In other words, this was company policy and everyone had to abide by it - no exceptions.
Perhaps if I had attended a school that specialized in business (I went to Chico State in Northern California, my education may have been different. However, judging the way many businesses are run today, I doubt that high profile schools teach anything more significant. If I'm wrong, let me know! I know people who have MBA's, but don't know anything about "empathy", which is something that needs to be offered if you want to keep a customer.
This brings me to Guy Winch, author of
The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships and Enhance Self-Esteem. The book is the first to examine our complaining psychology, its impact on how we complain as consumers (as well as in our relationships) and our interactions with the customer service industry.
I asked Guy about his thoughts on customer service as dialogue and this is what he said:
My thoughts on customer service as dialogue relates to the reason I wrote my book. The customer service industry can only go so far if consumer psychology doesn't change. Businesses still do not fully understand the psychological, perceptual and emotional beliefs and expectations most consumers have about the customers service industry, especially when it comes to complaint handling and service recoveries.
The vast majority of the people truly believe that businesses do not care about them and do not want to resolve their problems with products or services. While this might still be true about some companies, the majority of companies spend billions on customer service efforts aimed at retaining customers and successful service recoveries. And yet, how many of these companies train their customer service employees to convey true empathy successfully and to elicit from the customer whether they felt cared for?
Empathy cannot be scripted, as it is manifest in tone and the specifics of the situation. Unless a customer feels understood, they cannot feel as though the company cares. That is the customer service 'dialogue' I refer to, the conversation between companies and consumers as well as B2B situations in which these questions are rarely part of the discussion.
In my many interactions with customer service professionals around complaints and service recoveries while researching the book, only once did I hear something like, "I'm sorry again for [blank], I know it was very frustrating and I do hope you feel better about things now that we've taken steps to resolve the issue," followed by a pause to allow me to let them know how I felt.
In other words, the change has to happen in how companies think of their customer service goals, especially when it comes to service recoveries, as customer attrition and poor word of mouth can do great damage to a company while customer loyalty and positive word of mouth can do wonders for their bottom lines. It is a dialogue that has to start in meetings but translate to front line employees, and that is a radical overhaul indeed.
Click here to purchase The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships and Enhance Self-Esteem
Find out more about Guy Winch by visiting his website:
GuyWinch.com or follow him on Twitter:
@GuyWinch
