Customer Service

Does Your Customer Service Style Sabotage Your Customer Experience?

In business, we tend to think that good customer service is good customer service, and bad service is bad service, period. (And we know the difference, of course, when we see it.)

The thing about this is that it’s true, sort of. Maybe even mostly. 

The Duke Ellington Theorem of Customer Service

There’s a lot of truth to this “good is good, bad is bad” in customer service.  It’s the customer experience equivalent of Duke Ellington’s formulation that there are only “two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind.”

I do believe this about customer service.  Reaching your arm across a guest to clear a plate on the other side of her is true customer service evil, regardless of how hip and cutting-edge your restaurant aspires to be.

Rude is rude, thoughtful is thoughtful.

Wall Drug’s distinctive customer service style and branding. © Micah Solomon micah@micahsolomon.com

More or less.

“More or less” is  where this gets tricky. Because there’s actually a variety of customer service styles in the world. Your company, for that matter, already has one. On purpose or, as likely, by default: a service style that has evolved without your active guidance, that has sprung up from the experiences and inclinations of the people who work for you. And it may not suit you (and your customers) as well as it could.

For this reason, there’s a niche of customer service and customer experience consultants who work with companies to develop their own distinctive styles of customer service, their own distinctive way of building a customer experience for their customers. Of course I think this work is worthwhile, or I’d be in a different line of business.  But if you’re doing it in your own, if you want to be your own customer experience consultant, so to speak, here’s how to get it right.

1.       Consider your branding issues.  What style of language, uniforms, name badges or not (see below), scripted tag lines or not, and so forth are appropriate for the brand you are building

2.      Consider industry expectations: the expectations set by your competition.  An airline deciding it’s a hassle to offer drinks in first class before takeoff is going to appear chintzy and inhospitable (to the 1%, at any rate) as long as competing airlines’ first classes continue to offer drink service right away. Regardless of the overall sense or nonsense of doing so and blocking entry for the people trying to get back to steerage.

3.      Consider trends in service styles and trends in service desires.

Let’s pause here for a more in-depth look, because there are several customer service trends to consider:

•  Authenticity: Obvious scripting is starting to rub customers the wrong way, especially younger customers. But don’t use lack of scripting as an excuse to not have, and uphold standards. Working without a script requires extensive training and intense discipline.

•  Informality: As your customers become less and less formal in dress and language (and as the available pool of potential employees follows suit), customer service styles (grooming, visible tattoos, acceptable use of language) are being relaxed–to some extent.  Nobody wants to see a pilot in sweatpants or hear her talk about the “bitchin’ view out your window on the left”; nobody wants the maître d’ to say “no worries” when you thank him for a great evening. But there is a middle ground of informality that is infecting (or liberating) the world of service in many establishments.

• Increased acceptability of self service: it is not necessarily an insult, a sign of slacking, to invite a customer to try your self service options. As long as it isn’t forced on them.

• Transparency: Customers are becoming more comfortable seeing behind the the curtain, and understanding that you’re not the all-powerful monolithic Oz. Even, maybe, helping out in the kitchen (and paying sometimes to do so).

But don’t take this stuff too, too seriously.

To give just one example of the passionate service style debates raging (among people who get passionate about this stuff), is the question of name badges, and whether employees should or shouldn’t wear them.  There are strong opinions on both sides of this one, and major corporations have invested a fortune in research and man hours to figure out the answer to the question of whether employees should wear name badges or not.

(On the one hand-to make the argument brief- name badges facilitate easy if superficial conversations, and allow for easier accountability.  On the other hand, they seem a bit inauthentic; name badges put perhaps put an artificial limit on how close a relationship guest and service employee will have, since you would never expect a friend, or a host having you over to her house, to wear a name badge.)

The thing is: this is an interesting debate. And there probably is an answer that is more right than the other, for your particular business.  (If you want to suss that out, I have, believe it or not, a whole article on the name badge question.) But name badge or name badge will never be the most important style question. Nor will tattoos or no tattoos, ties or no ties, “no worries” or no no worries.

The most important style question

What matters most is the style of service that suits the specific customer in front of you, the specific human being you’re serving, at the specific moment of their life at which the service is being offered. Figuring out how to adjust to the mood, mindset, pacing, sensibilities of the rushed banker or the relaxed yoga mom (or, the relaxed banker/rushed yoga mom, for that matter).  Figuring out that you long-time, usually chipper customer is different today, that perhaps her pet died or her job is in jeopardy, and toning down your own chipperness to match.

Creating a great customer experience is never as simple or as straightforward as it looks at first blush.  As long as those you are serving are human beings.  Hardly a simple or straightforward bunch.

Micah Solomon is a customer service and customer experience