Lash out or lead with poise

Posted by random olio

You know when you have one of those days when every possible curve ball is thrown at you, going at the fastest speeds and you cannot imagine how you are ever going to hit it out of the park? Somehow you do, and somehow you do it with poise. Are you like that, or do you know someone like that? Or, do you wish that is how you handled life?

Poise is attractive. It is sexy. Why? It shows that someone can hold themselves together, keep their calm, and not let the situation affect them. I can give you an example. My husband, that man has poise. He will probably hate me for calling him out for having poise, but call a spade a spade right? Hundreds of times over the past 10+ years I have heard him handle people over the phone. He is direct, polite, does not get flustered or angry, yet firm to get what he deserves. Boy, do I have a lot to learn.

There are a lot of aspects of my life where I feel I carry myself with poise, but for some reason (usually surrounding customer service issues) I can sometimes lose my cool, or my composure. Why is that? What sets me off? Often I feel like a victim, that the company has overcharged us and will not reverse the charge, or the customer service agent is rude, unhelpful, or will not fix something that is truly the company’s responsibility. It is easy to slide into that victim mentality and lash out aggressively in hopes that it will fix the issue. Does it work? Sometimes. I have to say that lashing out has worked and leading with poise has also worked.

Maybe the goal is to work towards more poise, and pulling out the feisty aspects when needed?

Oh how I hate hold music.

Posted by random olio

How often do you call your cable company, or your credit card company and either have to listen to a zillion annoying little prompts to get to where you want to go, or you wait on the line for what feels like eternity only to listen to their hold music?

I can adamantly say that I have never once said to anyone: “Oh, xxxx company has the most amazing hold music.” Why is that? Why is waiting on hold to be helped so excruciatingly painful? Do they hope that most of us will hang up the phone out of boredom, anguish, and insanity and instead go online and send them an email? I try to do that as much as possible, but there are just certain things that need to be handled by a live person. I will give you a few examples:

_When your cable company (ahem, Comcast) continues to screw up your bill every month since you moved in 10 months ago. No email will ever be able to truly shed light on your true frustration, only duking it out with a live person will hopefully grant you the discounts and offers you deserve.

_Anything having to do with financial information, credit cards, and bank accounts should be handled online. Yes I am old school. I prefer a live person to mess up my account, then a live person behind an email. At least I can ask for my phone call to be escalated, and hopefully my phone call was “recorded for quality purposes.”

_You enjoy connecting with other people, making their day, and generally being the world’s nicest customer. I know a few people who fit that description, and they are the cream of the crop. If only we could have their patience.

I digress. This all started out being about hold music. I still do not understand why they have not invented hold music that connects you to Pandora or Spotify and lets you jam to your current selection. Maybe customer service representatives will find their customers happier, more patient, and generally not going insane by hearing the same song for the 37 minutes they waited on hold. Of course that song was interspersed with a few ads for lower interest rates, or how you could be saved money, with the additional message of how many other customers are in front of you in the queue.

#needmorepatience4holdmusic

Don’t give up.

Posted by random olio

Over the weekend, Chris and I were in LA. We rented a car, and after driving it for an hour or so, we realized it sounded horrible. It was a 2013 Prius, and was making the most annoying rattling noise. Knowing that we had an hour + drive ahead of us later that night, we both felt we needed to get a different car to ensure that we were not stranded with a broken down car late at night. (Not my idea of a good time).

First we called the closest Hertz location. No answer. We called the 800 number for Hertz Roadside Assistance. They said we would have to go back to the LAX location where we rented the car. Not an option, we would have sat in LA traffic both ways and never would have made it to our dinner plans. We drove to the Hertz location listed as closest (the one that did not answer the phone). It was not at the specified address. An hour has now passed.

We called Roadside Assistance again, and were transferred to another area within Hertz and got hung up on. We called another location in the vicinity, and they said they had no cars and that we should go back to LAX or call the Hertz 800 number. We called the 800 number, they said they would transfer us to the Venice Hertz. The man who answered that phone call said he would call a few different locations, took my number, and said he would call back. He never called back. We called Roadside Assistance again, and they said they would transfer us to Customer Care. We were disconnected.

By this time, I was livid, frustrated, and quite a bit nasty with Hertz. During my final call to Roadside Assistance, the agent tells me there is nothing they can do for me, the only people who can help me is the LAX location, but that I would need to go there to have them swap out cars. They let me know that Hertz Roadside Assistance can do nothing for all the frustration, hang-ups, my only resolution is at the LAX location (they supposedly have cars). By this time we are in Sherman Oaks, and a few hours have passed.

I call the LAX location at least 10 times, and each time I get a voicemail. I do not want to leave a voicemail, because who knows when anyone will return it. The agent tells me they cannot help me, after I get very irritated with her, and ask her what she would want done if she was in my situation, she agrees, but says she can no do anything to help me. I firmly ask to speak with her manager, (who I find out is Fred). Fred and I will spend the next few hours trading phone calls and voicemails. Hertz must not teach or empower their managers to think for themselves. He tells me there is nothing he can do for us, the only thing we can do is drive back to LAX and trade out for a new car. I knew that was not going to happen. So we had to decide to push further with Hertz, or give up all the hours we already wasted in our day and just drive north with the potential that our car will break down.

I am not one to give up. I press on. I tell him I am in Sherman Oaks, and will be for the next few hours. Could he find a location near me that can bring us a new car? He finds one at Burbank and tells me I have to drive there. I tell him that is not going to happen. We have plans and I have already wasted 5 hours of my afternoon being hung up on and trying to deal with his company. The least they could do is bring a car to us. He finds a Nissan Altima and says a tow truck will come to meet us, but it will be a few hours. I ask what he is going to do with my rental rate after giving us a car that was not 100%, having such horrible help and customer service issues, and that I lost half my day due to Hertz. He said there was nothing he could do. Eventually he says he will pay for our gas when we returned the Altima.

Ha. Our gas. Part of the reason for renting the Prius in California was the miles we were going to drive. I knew we would not have to pay much for gas, so his comping our gas was nothing. I asked him if he could comp a day, since we did not get to do all we wanted due to the car. He said he could not do that, but would comp me the gas. After I yell at him, and he yells at me, I hand the phone off to Chris. I am livid and sweating, and not going to give up. I used to be in customer service and I am appalled that someone who manages an entire Hertz location does not have the authority to fix these types of issues.

In the end, Chris told them if he did not fix this, and make it right, that I would end up taking it up the line at Hertz (and yes, I will be writing them a letter, and will be happy to share this blog post with them). He mentioned that I have a blog, and I will be sure to make my experience known so that others do not have a similar situation in the future. Fred said, “well we do not want that, let me call my manager.” He called us back and offered a day off our rental and to pay for our gas. In the end:

Hertz delivered the car to us in Sherman Oaks.
It was another Prius… new, with only 1,300 miles.
Our gas was only $10.17 to fill it back up… we paid for it.
We got one day comped on our rental.

Customer service representatives should always ask for phone numbers and call customers back if they get disconnected. My health insurance provider does that, and I appreciate it. Companies should also empower customer service agents and managers to be able to offer their customers some type of compensation when issues arise.

I wanted to share this in hopes that others will not give up if in a similar situation. What do you think?

The Perfect Airport Experience?

Posted by random olio

I know this article is from almost a year ago, but the ideas are still valid. It is a Harvard Business Review article called: “Is Kindness a Strategy?” It is about how an American Airlines employee treated a customer (Frank) with kindness (read the article for his full story). The employee decided to help Frank, who was late for his flight. She made an extra effort to get him through security and onto his flight at the last-minute.

Ah, do you dream of that happening to you? Have you not wanted to go to the airport, have someone take your car and park it for you? You then go to security and get moved to the front of the line, walk to the gate and walk right on the plane, immediately they shut the doors and the plane takes off. There are no delays on the runway, and you are in the air and land on time. The plane goes immediately to your gate, you are at the front of the plane so you get off first, and someone has a car waiting for you when you get outside the airport. Is it a dream? Is it your reality? There are some that might valet their car, go through the First Class line in security, and go right on to the plane, but it is not the reality for most of us that fly the friendly skies.

I wish this could be the experience of all of us when we travel. Even though it is not, it does make me think about what is possible. Travel companies could definitely be more creative to find ways to WOW their customers. Which makes me think back to the title of the article: “Is Kindness a Strategy?” Maybe it should be. I agree with the author, American will now be Frank’s favorite airline. It would be mine, if I had Frank’s experience. What can travel companies do to make us more loyal? Surprise us. Give the upgrade when there are seats in First Class. Give a free rental car because they can tell we have had a rough day. Empower their employees to have more flexibility to make these types of decisions.

It may make a world of difference to their customers.

Oh, Behave…

Posted by random olio

Can you change my feelings and sway me? Seth Godin says: “The only purpose of ‘customer service’…is to change feelings.” I believe him, well almost. I think it should be a part of customer service. We each have a right to be treated as humans, connect with individuals, and enjoy our customer experience. Yet, so often, our experience has little to no human contact, no personal connection, and feels robotic. Where did I find this quote from Godin? I came across this blog post from back in October while thinking about the idea of “service.” The full quote says:

“The only purpose of ‘customer service’…is to change feelings. Not the facts, but the way your customer feels. The facts might be the price, or a return, or how long someone had to wait for service. Sometimes changing the facts is a shortcut to changing feelings, but not always, and changing the facts alone is not always sufficient anyway.”

Imagine if every individual that worked in some type of service environment made it their mission to impact, change the mind of, or shift the thought of at least one customer a day. In the grand scheme of things that would not be that hard, and maybe that is already happening in every company in the world. But, what if those interactions were shared, and we saw the ripple effect? What if we did know of the impact we had each day, or that we changed how an individual felt? Would we do more to ensure that our behavior happened more often? If we had positive reinforcement of our behavior would that start a domino effect?

There are businesses out there that are changing the nature of customer service. Their impact could mean we eventually have a better customer experience, but I shudder as I think about the impact of technology on service. On the one side you might have a more efficient, yet robotic process, allowing the customer to track down their own answer. In many cases, this works. When a customer does not find their own answer, then it is often a dead-end. When the situation needs a personal touch, a ruffled edge smoothed, or when the issue needs live problem solving that only a human can answer, where is that service? Many companies would say it is too costly to provide that kind of service, yet what does that say about the true value of their customer?

What would it truly take to bring back the human interaction and accountability of service? Is customer service heading in the direction of Wall-E?