Don’t let your employees fuck it up

Avoiding cringe worthy customer service

Tiffany & Co. rep: “I am sorry — your business doesn’t have a 2 year credit history and therefore doesn’t qualify for a business account.”

Me: “Thanks. I don’t need credit — happy to pay by credit card — I just want to open a business account. Can I speak with a supervisor in case you can’t help me?”

Tiffany & Co. rep: “Doesn’t matter — businesses without a 2 year credit history can’t open a business account. I am the head of the credit department so there is no one else you can speak to.” Click.

This was the gist of the conversation I had calling the Tiffany business account department (I didn’t record the conversation so this is my recollection from memory). That might have been the end of it were it not for my curiosity. I looked up the Tiffany & Co. executives — turns out one of them is a Harvard Business School alum so I decided to call the corporate office and leave them a quick 2 min voicemail detailing my situation. I wanted to understand why they didn’t want to take my money. Was this a smart business tactic in the luxury goods market — play hard to get — and make me want an account even more? (In case you were wondering why a technology company needs a Tiffany account — I was looking to get our new hires a silver Tiffany pen as a starting gift. Ten years ago, I had gotten the same gift on my first day at McKinsey & Co. — a gift I still have and treasure!).

Within 2 hours, I had received multiple calls from the corporate office. They apologized profusely, they reiterated that Tiffany absolutely wanted my business, my account wasn’t too small for them to care etc. etc. I hadn’t raised a stink on social media or complained or threatened to sue — so this wasn’t damage control on their part. As far as I can tell, they were just as incensed that their company/employees were turning away good money. It didn’t make any sense to them — somehow how they wanted to run the business and what they wanted to do was getting scrambled as it went down the business chain of command.

I am sure this happens to all companies each and every day. Not every customer has the time and inclination to follow up like I did. How much money does your business lose from bad decisions made by well intentioned employees in the company? Decisions that if you hear about would cause you to cringe and face palm? (Happens to large well run companies all the time: United, Verizon, Southwest to name a few).

Here are some thoughts on what you can do to prevent that:

1. Don’t blame the employee — first of all, don’t blame the employee. They are just trying to do their job based on what they think the company wants. Make sure you are sending the right signals and setting up the right incentive structures. For example, if you reward a retention agent ONLY for how many customers he/she saves, then it is only natural they will make it a painful experience for your customer to cancel. Don’t be surprised later if their call with a customer trying to cancel service goes viral!
2. Publish your email address — at a large company, it is easy to become isolated from the customer and become part of an echo chamber. Make sure your company’s top officers can be easily reached by customers e.g. jeff@amazon.com to reach Jeff Bezos or mark@zynga.com to reach Mark Pincus. When I started at Amazon, I was told multiple stories of Jeff escalation emails — situations where Jeff forwards a customer email to an employee with a single “?” asking for an explanation (you can imagine what happens when those explanations are not satisfactory). Those stories instilled a mindset where I weighed every customer decision/interaction with a simple criteria — would I be able to explain my communications & decisions to Jeff if the customer were to complain to him and I got one of those escalation emails? Its amazing how that single simple criteria does the job better than tomes of rules and regulations.
3. Tip of the iceberg — Once a customer has complained, it is easy to become engrossed on managing the situation — making that particular customer happy, stopping the social media firestorm, making sure the press doesn’t pick it up etc. When the situation is resolved, you breathe easy and move on to the next priority. How often do you follow up 1 week or 1 month after the incident to see what changes the company has made to prevent that situation from happening? Chances are there are 10 or even 100 customers who have the same problems/issues as the person who had complained. If you don’t fix the underlying issues, those customers will simply get frustrated and disappear over the coming weeks and months.
4. Review policies and rules — any organization picks up rules and procedures the longer it exists. This happens with companies, non-profits, and governments. This is one of the reasons why people enjoy the freedom of being part of a startup instead of a large company. There are simply fewer accumulated restrictions and rules in a company with a shorter tenure. You may want to consider taking a page out of India’s new PM’s book and start reviewing and removing unneeded policies.
5. Owner mindset — if you can, try to instill an owner mindset in your company’s employees. Amazon’s leadership principle captures it perfectly — Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.” Employee with an ownership mindset won’t follow dumb rules blindly and would agree to stop charging dead customers as soon as they were alerted to it (Verizon) and not call them fat to their face (Southwest).

Would love to hear your ideas on how to prevent these avoidable cringe worthy incidents!