‘Off Duty’, are you ever really?

As a representative of your company are you ever really off duty? I have been thinking about this a good deal over the past week. Some of you may have noticed I didn’t post a blog last week. I took a few personal days to spend time with, in one aspect, the most important customers I will ever have, my children.

Now I do not say that to imply I treat them as customers, but many ways we react and treat our family members is the basic form of how we treat our customers. First we serve them, we serve them in fact it is our job to teach them how to be good adults, citizens, and people in general. So the roots of everything I do for my customers comes back to being as I was taught to be, honest, caring, fair, and take pride in everything you do. As we live our lives and spend time with our kids we are passing on these values on to them.

So are we really ever “Off Duty”? Driving into work this morning I was passed by a pickup truck with a General Contractors name on the side of the door. Now I wouldn’t think twice about this except I was traveling with the flow of traffic, which in the Charleston area, is qualifying speeds at some NASCAR tracks. Also after the truck passed me, in the right lane mind you as I was in the left, he pulled in front of me, braking since there was a slower moving traffic in the right lanes and traffic in front of me, traveling at the “qualifying” speed. He continued just a few feet from the bumper of the truck in front of him until that truck finally reached a position to move to the right and left him by. Now in this process another truck pulled out from the right lane in front of me, after signaling. Notice I never mentioned a signal on the first truck his must have been broken since he never used them.

But being the guy that normally gets notified if one of my service drivers gets a complaint phoned in on them, it started me thinking. How would the owner of the General Contractor react if he knew his customer service image being projected by one of his trucks was pushy, completely disregard for safety, and uncaring. Whereas the second truck was a company truck as well (fire alarm sub contractor), and it projected just the opposite impression. The driver was thoughtful, courteous, and respectful of others.

I allowed my mind to wonder a bit and thought of the past few days I had spent with my kids. I realized then we are never really “off duty”. What if you were out with friends and had a bit too much to drink, would you want to run into your customers then? How about letting your kids see that example? Felt wronged and used some inappropriate langue and turn only to be eye to eye with a client? Wish you could eat those words, right?

When are you “Off Duty”?

Serving Your Internal Customers

Over the last few weeks we have discussed customer service from the perspective of the external customer. But what about the internal customer we all have, our employees?

Let’s face it, as managers, dealing with the external customers is only one aspect of our daily jobs. Dealing with the other employees is a large part of what we do every day. We are the first stop most of the time for the employee, more so than HR. Why is that? Simple, like our external customers they have developed a level of trust with us.

Just like our external customers, our internal customers need to feel like they are part of the team and it is our job to maintain that relationship with them. Remember, they are the face the external customer see’s and has the greatest impact on them. If we keep our internal customers happy they will do their utmost to keep the external customer happy for you.

That doesn’t mean to say we are to give them everything they ask for, just as it was when we were little kids and we asked our parents for something. If we got everything we asked for we became spoiled brats and did not appreciate what we already have now. Also, in the long run if we did give them everything we would be able to see it was the beginning of the end for that internal customer.

Being in a management position for many years I learned from one of the best managers I ever had the opportunity to work with that in doing reviews no one gets a perfect score. If you receive a perfect score what do you have to work on, what skill should you sharpen? I have heard of only one person that was able to walk on water, if one is perfect walking on water should be an easy task. There is always room for improvement in whatever we are doing. I have been in the electrical field for 30 years, I have yet to have mastered it, and despite holding two masters licenses’ I know I will never truly master the trade.  I will never stop learning about this trade. We all continue to learn at whatever we are doing, we all have a need to be challenged and to grow.

Finding the balance in dealing with our internal customers is a challenge every day. Is the person you’re dealing with in a bad mood? Did they have a fight with their spouse before work that is eating at them and dividing their attention? Did they get bad news about something? Did they get good news and are not focusing as they should be on the task at hand? All of these things may or may not be known to us as we begin to interact with our internal customers.

Each individual has a different personality and that comes into play as well in our dealings. Are they the type of person that is open to a direct frank comment? Are comments more accepted if the person is led into making the suggestion back to you as if it was their idea being presented, a more indirect personality? Is the person open or guarded? What type of personality are you dealing with and how you approach the different personality makes a great difference. In the book by “Who moved my Cheese?” by Doctor Spencer Johnson, he separates the characters in to four groups based on their personality traits. It portrays how the different individuals accept and deal with change. Learning how to identify and understand what personality type a person is will assist you in managing your internal customers. Teaching your internal customers this same process will assist them in dealing with your external customer, and making them both a better customer. Isn’t that what we are all striving to create?

“Oh Well, Can’t Make Everyone Happy” The Hidden Costs of Losing a Customer

“Can’t please everyone”, or “Can’t make everyone happy”, have you ever heard or made this type of comment after a customer is lost? Why is it we can’t admit we might have been the problem? Because it is human nature to admit when we are wrong, it is humbling when we have to eat a little crow and admit we didn’t do everything we could have for the customer.

But what is the true cost of losing a customer? A great deal more than getting a new customer to replace them that is for sure. It keeps costing us down the road.

When we lose a customer we lose the best and cheapest advertising we could ever hope to have, testimonials from a trusted customer is our greatest sales person! Not only do they go farther to promote our services than anything we can offer but they act like our personal customer service manager with the new customer. If the new customer is pleased they tell our current customer and we get the feedback. Because we have taken the time to make that current customer a valued trusted client they are excited for us to get the “sale”.  But forget to value that customer, to treat that client as the only client that matters and soon they are someone else’s client.  And that is not where the damage begins it is where the damage continues to compound.

The damage began when you didn’t value your customer. You maybe still the topic of conversation just not the topic you want to be associated with to promote your service. Imagine if you go to two restaurants one is perfect, service as to be expected, food delivered to you correctly and politely and the taste is out of this world. Now you go to the second restaurant and you are treated rudely, your food was cold, wrong, and/or terrible, etc. how many people do you tell? You don’t tell anybody, you tell EVERYBODY! And you will tell more people about the bad restaurant than you will about the first restaurant! Our customers are our restaurant patrons.

Bad service keeps coming back to haunt us long after the lost of a customer. Just like us, our customers have long memories when it comes to poor service. This is where the communication comes in from last week. If you have established good communication with your customer your will know about any issues long before they become a major problem. The bad service spreads like wild fire and you have no way of finding out how far the fire has spread out sometimes until it is too late. Possible customers you haven’t even contacted yet may have already heard about you before you step foot in their door.

What about the cost it takes to repair the damage done to your reputation? Remember when you were a little kid and you did something wrong and your Mom and Dad told you how disappointed in you they were? You apologized and racked your brain trying to figure out how you could regain their trust/approval. That is how we should feel about our customer’s feelings toward us. If something does happen that damages our reputation we need to in front of our customer bending over backwards to regain the trust that was lost. It will not be repaired in one trip it only will be repaired over time and just when we think it has been repaired we need to keep pushing to make it forgotten before we are reminded of this again.

If we can’t repair the damage and we do lose the customer the effects are like the ripples in a pond when you throw a stone in the pond. We may have already gotten a new customer and replace the lost revenue but have we really replaced it? The world is really a small place and before you know it you will be explaining to another client what happened with the lost client, or you will be explaining it to your competition at a networking event, trade association meeting, etc. That is the worst possible situation you can be in as well, because now your competitor has knowledge of a weakness that can be used against you with your other customers. Remember if we are not taking care of our customers, our competition will be.

Our only defense is good customer service, which starts with good communication. Don’t promise things you can’t deliver, deal with complaints personally, listen to your customers, be helpful, even if that isn’t what your there for, your customer will remember when you help them out.

Good customer service pays for itself over and over.