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Customer service professionals and leaders need always remember that great customer service is defined by the customer and from the customer’s perspective. Yet as with most professions, the temptation to see things from the inside often takes control and drives beliefs.

When this temptation controls for too long, the beliefs become ingrained. These deep-rooted customer service myths can sink long term success.

Customer Service Myths That Won't Die

Here are 4 of these customer service myths that won’t die. What would you add to this list and how can we finally bust these myths from the soul of customer service?

MYTH #1: Delivery is more important than how you treat the customer. There are many who believe that as long as you deliver the goods or solve the customers’ problems, the customers will be very pleased. Not true. 
Remember, if you stress the customers out along the way — they will remember the negative even if you deliver in the end. They start looking for companies that can make service easier next time.


MYTH #2: If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. Baloney. All the discoveries humans have made existed before we discovered them. Metrics are a valuable tool for humans to make decisions. They are one means to an end — they are not the end.
Believing that metrics are the heart and soul of great customer service is a very dangerous myth.


MYTH #3: Customers separate customer service from customer experience like companies do. Are you laughing as much as I am at this one?
Customers don’t care what you call it. They want every aspect of products and services to meet their needs and be easy to use!


MYTH #4: If you treat customers well, you teach them to be demanding and unreasonable. Huh? How did that one get started and plant its long roots into the customer service psyche?
Let’s replace that myth with the truth: If you treat customers badly, they eventually go elsewhere.

What other harmful customer service myths do you want to bust apart? I welcome your customer service voice in the comments section below.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

The title of this post, Customer Service: High Touch B4 High Tech, might suggest I am resurrecting the old debate about the value of technology. I’m not. I write today to raise the flag on a new trend that maliciously undermines great customer service and the customer experience.

Customer Service: High Touch with High Tech

Business leaders, business owners, and their customer service teams are placing more focus on high tech than on connecting with the customer.

High tech delivers many capabilities to the customer experience — choice of self-service, automated confirmations, shared knowledge bases, inventory checks, timely shipping, and the list goes on and on. Yet a high tech focus alone does not create great customer service — not even online.

1. E-commerce sites designed without a true customer focus are maddening to use and dissuade customers of all generations from returning.
2. Websites that hide their contact info and phone number send a negative message to the customer — “don’t bother us”.

In face-to-face customer service (retail, hospitality, etc…), a focus on high tech is even more damaging. I witness front desk agents at hotels standing sideways to the customers because the computers are at a right angle to the desk. Face-to-face customer service means “look at and care for the customer” — not talk over your shoulder.

I see retail sales associates walking around wearing headsets. This may look cool to the young generation yet it sends a negative message to many customers — “I’m busy”. Victoria Secret, Bath & Body Works, Staples, etc… are doing this and it diminishes the customer experience.

Conversely, Macy’s flagship store in NYC has blended technology into the customer experience very well. In the shoe department, the sales associates have hand held devices to check inventory for sizes. What a great use of high tech to facilitate and support the customer experience. They have had self-service price check scanners for quite awhile making shopping easier and more profitable.

Bravo Macy’s. Your high tech supports a faster more informative connection to and for the customer.


What have you experienced as a customer? Great high tech supporting customer service or — businesses focusing on high tech instead of focusing on you? Please share your story in the comments section below.

A recent trip to a Bath & Body Works with my mom proved to be both a humorous and insightful customer experience. The young cashier, wearing a headset, scanned my mom’s items and then started the prescribed cross-selling of other scents. Alas success was not in her grasp because details did derail her.

Customer Service Experience: Details Derail Image by:Jinx

The music was blaring in the store and the cashier was mumbling quickly. I could only hear the last word of each question. I laughed hysterically as I watched and listened to this ridiculous interaction between my mom and the cashier.

Cashier: Blah blah blah coconut? Mom: “No”.
Cashier: Blah blah blah cucumber melon? Mom: “No”.
Cashier: Blah blah blah mango? Mom: “No”.

In fact, my mom told me later she didn’t even hear the scents. She found the loud music and mumbling cashier annoying and not being able to read lips, she refused to buy anything else.

The Details of a Great Customer Experience

1. Care about what the customer cares about. If your demeanor, behavior, and actions are all about what your company care about , the customer won’t care about you.
2. Make it conversational. Robotic inaudible questions don’t sell. A slightly slower pace with a tone of a real question, makes the difference. Just last week, a cashier sold me some new chewing gum with a sincere question: Would you like to try it? It’s really good and a steal at this price?
3. Make it personal and personable. Many retail stores like Victoria Secret and Bath & Body Works have their sales associates on the floor wearing headsets. This one detail inhibits a great customer experience. It inhibits customers from approaching the sales associates. They look busy. They look preoccupied. They look as if their job is to listen to whomever is speaking into their ear instead of to the customer.
4. Know and remember the difference between the customer’s experience and managing the customer experience. Leaders and managers like things routinized to make them easy to measure, analyze, and supposedly improve.

   Yet I ask leaders, when the details of those prescribed procedures create a bad customer experience — which they will — what exactly do your measures guide you to improve? I daresay no manager or leader will know how much money and potential customer loyalty they missed from my mom’s disgust.

Let empowered sales and service associates use great people-skills to engage customers for great results.

If you want to give your associates and reps a rule to follow, this one will create a great customer experience:

Great speakers and writers know the power of words. The right words can excite, engage, and entertain. They can paint images, spur debate, and chart new directions.

The right words, however, cannot get beyond a listening boundary we create ourselves. In my teaching, consulting, and blogging, I have seen one pesky listening boundary recur across diverse audiences.

Previous experience traps words in one context & blocks listening.

Swim Beyond Your Listening Boundary

1. When we already have strong feeling, emotion, or opinion. In my customer service workshops, the word paraphrase often stops people from listening to what I mean by that word. They picture the horrible experience of agents reading from a script parroting each thing they say. This of course is not paraphrasing. Yet their previous experience temporarily blocks listening.




2. When we have had intense or rigid occupational training. There are some professions where certification or licensing drill people into fixed ways of thinking. Good for performance in that profession; bad for listening and interacting beyond that boundary.




3. When we crave control. Cravings take over mind and body and block listening. Oddly enough, craving control destroys any chance of having control. Without input, our current knowledge becomes outdated or invalid. Listening is the path to continued understanding and success.




4. When we are impatient for results and closure. Time pressures, personality type, fear of failure breed impatience and create a listening boundary.

Listening Beyond the Boundary
Question, digest, and absorb.

1. Replace fear of looking ignorant with strength from active listening.

2. Postpone persuading until you know the field of sway.

3. Consider the context of the communicator before hawking your context.

4. Leave room for various meanings. Language is not a science.

Shall we start a list of common words that trap us in a listening boundary? Or will you share below some other conditions that spawn listening boundaries? I welcome your contributions to this post in the comments section below.

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. For permission to re-post or republish, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

It is common in a restaurant for the server or maitre d’ to ask you how you like your meal while you are eating. They gather feedback before you are done. Hotels ask their guests how is their stay going.

There are pearls of wisdom in that approach. Gathering feedback before the finish line gives the customer service provider a clearer picture of the customers’ expectations throughout the delivery of service. This tremendously increases the chance for customer satisfaction.

Then why do customer service providers rarely gather feedback during a phone call or webchat? They often ask a customer to stay on the line after the call or chat to complete a feedback survey. Isn’t that a bit late for that customer’s satisfaction?

Customers’ feedback are little pearls that your reps and agents can string together into customer satisfaction before the finish of the call or chat.

Customer Service Feedback Before the Finish Line

I propose that the customers’ would love to give feedback before the finish line. Why else would they use Social Media like Twitter and Facebook when customer service is failing them?

I ask for feedback while I am consulting with clients — face to face, on the phone, or online in a webinar or videoconference. When I am delivering customer service & team building workshops, I ask for feedback at breaks and lunch to see what they are thinking.

Picture your reps or agents asking customers — “how’s my service so far?”

It makes customer service a dialogue — an engagement of the customers’ views during the process. Empowered reps and agents can then adjust their delivery to meet the customers’ needs.

Social media is engaging your customers more than ever before. Are you? Engage them and gather some pearls during the calls and chats.

Business Benefits

1. Dynamic in-the-moment low cost learning about customers’ needs and expectations
2. Creating a loyal customer through listening to them and reaching their finish line
3. Preventing a dissatisfied customer (who seeks an audience) bashing your brand on Social Media
4. Creating memorable moments instead of routine actions — customers remember moments and your brand!

One simple question, “How’s my service so far?” to change course and turn customer service into customer engagement.

Gathering feedback before the finish line gives you preventive and proactive success!


What tips for success would you like to share in the comments section below? I welcome your perspective.


©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. For permission to re-post or republish, please email info@katenasser.com.

Whether you are a customer service leader or a customer, you have most likely witnessed great customer service reps (CSRs) or technical support reps. dealing easily with difficult situations. What makes the best CSRs successful is that they define the moments as difficult situations not as difficult customers.

CSRs can change tough situations into successful outcomes with listening, empathy, knowledge, and action. They can’t change people and the best CSRs know this.

Beat Attribution Error

In fact, the best CSRs actually beat a common mistake most people make in everyday life — attribution error.

Attribution error is the tendency to over value personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. (Source: Wikipedia).

Stated simply, we think it’s something inside of the people that makes them act badly. Meanwhile when it is our own behavior, we are more likely to attribute it to external conditions.

Since the best CSRs free themselves from the grip of attribution error, they shine and succeed at:

1. Empathy. They walk easily in the customers’ shoes because they believe external conditions have caused the customers’ behavior. If instead you attribute the behavior to something evil or sinister inside of the customers, how or why would you empathize?

1. Empowerment. They believe that they can fix external conditions and this fuels their desire to work through the details and with the customers.

1. Listening. The best CSRs value listening as critically as surgeons value their instruments. It is through listening that they find the external conditions they must fix.

1. Knowledge. They also use the knowledge of previous customers’ behaviors to prevent future attribution error. The best CSRs have proven to themselves that external conditions cause many of the difficult situations — not malicious customers intending harm.

1. Well-timed Action. CSRs caught in the grip of attribution error, often try to push irate or upset customers to calm down. The best CSRs know that listening and well-timed communication calm the customers and unearth the external conditions leading to action.

The implication for training CSRs is quite clear. Have them do a simple exercise like using another company’s website. As they encounter challenges, do they blame themselves for the difficulty or do they blame external conditions like website design, or internet connection speed etc…? Then raise the issue of attribution error.

The next time upset or irate customers call, the CSRs’ attitudes will be far more empathetic. If you have empowered them to take action, you will also see fewer call escalations to team leaders and supervisors.

BONUS: Lower stress. CSRs who view tough moments as difficult situations that they can fix, experience less stress and greater fulfillment. Now that’s motivation!

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™
M.A. Organizational Psychology

©2011-2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ.  If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post,  please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Related post: Hiring, a Natural Call to Customer Serivce

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Customers remember moments. The truly memorable customer service moments move them to tell others about you, your products, your customer service. How would you make yours truly memorable – in a positive way of course?

Be unique and different within the context of your brand.

Customer Service as Memorable as a Baby Image by:atduskgreg

CDBaby.com does that at the moment of arrival! What is CD Baby? It started as a one person business in a garage and grew up to be the largest distributor of independent music. It’s run by musicians and their creativity shows even before you play the CD.

Here’s the memorable packing slip that arrived with the CD:

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterward and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, March 3, 2011. We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.

In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…
We miss you already. We’ll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.

Kudos to CD Baby. They make it memorable in ways that connect and enhance their brand. Notice how often people share stories of a baby, a picture of a baby, a video of out of unique behaviors of a baby. (If you don’t believe me, check out how many baby videos have gone viral on YouTube).

CD Baby uses the theme of caring for a baby to show how much they care for you the customer. They also make it truly memorable with a bit of outrageous humor. The story telling gives them the chance to repeat their company name in a memorable yet non-annoying way. This is no cost creative caring that makes customer service as memorable as a baby!

What stories will you share here about truly memorable customer service that you have received? I will be right here waiting … sigh.

Yours in service,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach

Professionals with great people skills (soft skills) win big in sales, customer service, teamwork, and leadership. They tend to lead better because they understand people, collaborate more easily, sell more by hearing what customers aren’t saying, and shine by anticipating customers’ needs for service.

How well you can read people and interact with them determines your professional success. I was reminded on New Years Eve of how great people skills can help you win big in other ways.

The Funny Story!

Win Big with Great People Skills

In each turn there is a question and a selector who decides which card/answer of all those played is the winning answer. The person who played the selected card/answer wins the point.

Ooh — my how to read people skills went into overdrive. For each question, I thought about the selector, what s/he cares about and how s/he makes decisions.

Point after point went to me. They started saying, Hey how are you doing this? I replied “Beginner’s luck?”. I won the game. It wasn’t luck and I am not psychic. I simply thought first about the decision maker and what matters to her/him. That drove my actions.

“Seek first to understand then to be understood.” ~Saint Francis of Assisi

Win Big With Great People Skills

1. To lead and inspire innovation, get comfortable with diverse personality and natural conative styles. Tap innovation where it lives — in your team members’ minds!
2. To collaborate better on teams, see how others see things and how they see you. Present your unique ideas in ways they can understand.
3. To change careers, explore how that new discipline sees things differently then add your experience. You will win big.
4. To increase sales bridge the gap between your outlook and your customers’ and then make them successful.
5. To deliver truly memorable customer service, step outside of your own perspective and into theirs.

Develop your people skills to win big in life.


What win have you had in your personal or professional life from great people skills? Please share your story in the comments section below to help and inspire others.