“The customer is always right.”
Wrong.
The customer is often incorrect. One holiday season, one of our customers took to social media to complain at length that the flowers he had ordered from us had failed to arrive at his mother’s door. He wasn’t shy about calling us all kinds of names. Our customer service team scrambled to find out what had gone wrong.
It turned out he’d ordered from one of our competitors. We think we have a pretty memorable name, but I guess sometimes customers get confused.
In another instance, we were the vendor of flowers for a funeral—a terrible tragedy in which several members of one family were killed in a house fire. The surviving relative kicked up a media storm when he made public his dismay that the flowers he’d ordered from us had not been delivered. Shocked, we sent a representative to the funeral home to investigate. The flowers were there.
These customers were not right. And that happens a lot. The world is full of busy people and sometimes they make mistakes. That being the case, what can we do with the adage “the customer is always right”? It’s a core mantra of the modern business era. Goodness knows, our customers are familiar with it, and sometimes they recite it to us when they call. We may not think it’s true, but it’s part of the fabric of customer‐retailer relations.
Here’s what I tell our customer service teams: The customer may not always be right. But he’s always the customer. When you find yourself in conversation with a customer, your job is not to accept that he’s right; your job is to make him happy. Whether he’s right or wrong, that’s your goal.
To make that happen, we approach our training and customer service process a little differently than most. It is, like many of our efforts, rooted in the importance we place on conversation:
Cut to the chase. In the old days, we might spend hours trying to track down what had gone wrong with an angry customer’s order. I had an epiphany one night just before Valentine’s Day: The whole research process was a waste of time. We used to do it to ensure that people who called us with problems were really our customers—not someone trying to get over on us by calling up and demanding our help when they’d never actually ordered anything. That night before Valentine’s Day, we faced the usual big spike in customer issues and a long night of chasing them down.
“Skip the research,” I declared. “Don’t tell the customers you’ll check it out and get back to them. Just fast‐forward to “How would you like this resolved?”
“But Jim,” one of my colleagues objected, “won’t that encourage people to just call us up and lie? If we don’t investigate, how will we know if it’s really our fault or if someone is just trying to get a free bouquet out of us?”
This was a fair point. But I stuck to my original instruction. Sure, perhaps a few bad apples will get one over on us and get free flowers because we didn’t investigate first. But many more customers will be made happy by what they hear on the phone—right then and there—without waiting.
Technology amplifies a customer conversation. Whenever your bring technology into the customer conversation, the potential for it to get hot in a hurry goes way up. Technology, it seems, loosens our sharp tongues and makes us more likely to communicate harshly than we would have were we face-to-face.
When I worked in my first flower shop in Manhattan, it was unusual for someone to walk into my shop and really let me have it. Certainly, there were difficult conversations that happened, as they do in any retail business. But a true voices‐raised exchange was never the norm in the store. On the phone, people were far more inclined to yell. Somehow, not having to look me in the eye made that easier. Today, in the era of digital communication, that tendency to let technology pump up the volume is pronounced. People will say things online that they’d never dream of saying to a human being at arm’s length. Name‐calling, vitriol, calls for legal action, boycotts, even suggestions of violence. It’s a stunning example of how human beings communicate and what outside elements can shape the tone of any conversation.
We train all our customer service contact people to recognize this human phenomenon: Conversation heat escalates with each layer of technology. Be aware of how the machines may be affecting the course of the conversation. Can you get an angry Facebook poster to move to a chat window? Can the Twitter user be encouraged to move to the telephone? Remember that the customers who turn to the Internet are either very, very happy or very, very angry, and the technology adds volume—and permanence—to their words.
Conversation means listening. A good conversation requires listening—and if you want to have a positive impact, you may listen more than you speak. Consider your own personal network for a moment. Who among the people you know are the best conversationalists? While you’re thinking about them, do you picture them talking or listening? The truth is, the best conversationalists are top‐notch listeners. They are the individuals who understand that talking and conversing are not the same thing. They seek at all times to keep dialogue—not just noise—going.
Adapted from “TALK IS (NOT!) CHEAP: The Art of Conversation Leadership” by Jim McCann (New Harvest, January 2014), by 1-800-Flowers.com CEO Jim McCann. For more information, visit http://www.amazon.com/Talk-Not-Cheap-Jim-McCann/dp/0544114329/ref=sr_1_2_title_1_har?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385138767&sr=1-2&keywords=talk+is+not+cheap
1-800-FLOWERS.com CEO Jim McCann is a successful entrepreneur whose vision and energy have helped grow the company into a leading florist and gift company. He is also the author of “TALK IS (NOT!) CHEAP: The Art of Conversation Leadership” (New Harvest, January 2014).
