Customer Service

I received a note from a friend, telling me that she was seriously stressed because her laptop had died while she was in the middle of writing an article, so that now instead of doing actual work, she is doing PC recovery. I empathized with her. Unlike most people, she has a live-in tech support guy who can spend all the time necessary to keep her PC (and all of the others that they have) functioning happily and correctly, with all the latest gadgetry. He has the time, tools, and resources to get her PC functional again. But that doesn't ease the pain of having to go through it, or living without what comes very quickly to feel like an appendage of you. Its right up there with waking up to find out that the toilet has died. Having the PC just die on you when you need it is like biting down on a piece of tinfoil.

That instant-to-hand tech support is nice, though. Most of us don't have that. Even those of us who work for computer companies, where we use PCs all the time, don't have it. I work for one, and it is common -- so common as to be unremarkable now -- to have someone lose their laptop because the hard drive crashed, or because a piece of software stopped working, and they have to either a) send the laptop physically away to be fixed (sometimes they get a replacement; last week, a co-worker went from a laptop with Windows 2000 and all of the apps he needs to a desktop running Windows 95 and few of the apps he needed), or b) attempt to fix it themselves (I know of two people who were shipped a new hard drive which they were supposed to install into the laptop themselves). Your hardware dies, and your life stops while you address it. The idea that you need to drive the process of repair, instead of being able to go to a qualified person and have them take care of it, isn't right, either. But no one seems willing to recognize that as a problem, and more importantly, to fix it. The days of on-site tech support are over, at least in my little corner of the empire, and in other companies as well.

The concept resonated with an article in today's Washington Post about the dearth of service in retail stores, which the author partially attributes to the culture of sale clerks who cannot (or will not) take on responsibility for fixing a transaction that has gone astray -- in one example from the article, a desire to buy a bookcase which is in bubblewrap; the sales clerk didn't know if it was available for sale, her manager didn't know and said he'd have to get the store manager, and, when the store manager didn't respond to a page, said that the bookcase was not available. To which, the customer responded by personally finding the store manager, who said that of course it was for sale; there was a small problem with it, but he would knock down the price by 20% if the customer took it. The tale ended happily, but why couldn't the clerk have done the same? The answer comes, I think, from the idea that no one pays the clerk to take responsibility, and the effects of taking responsibility in a failed transaction can adversely affect the clerk's career. The idea of a mission statement -- remember them? -- was to give general guidance to employees when specific policies didn't exist, or would be too cumbersome to elucidate in detail; in this case, a mission statement could well have said that the clerk is authorized to take the same action as the manager. But when there is no good reason for the clerk to do so -- and a happy customer, in and of itself, isn't perceived as a good reason -- and there is good reason for the clerk not to do so -- the manager might disagree with giving a discount, or think that the discount was too high, and perhaps the book case really wasn't for sale -- then the clerk wouldn't want to take the risk, even if there was a mission statement encouraging her to do so.

The tie in between these two concepts is in the area of responsiveness to problems. No one -- yes, even me, glum though I am to admit it -- will respond to ongoing problems, because a) That’s Not Our Job, and b) Our Manager Cannot Be Counted On To Support Us If We Do It Anyway. There is no up-side. If you want to take the initiative to fix the problem, you have to take the risk. And you've got to do the job right -- mere desire, or 'gee, at least I tried', is not enough. I observed years ago that in a large company, if you want them to keep paying you, you can either Fit In, or Be Exceedingly Excellent (not just excellent). If you fit in, and are a good organization person, the organization will keep paying you; if you're Exceedingly Excellent, the organization will want you, and keep paying you. But if you don't really fit in, and you're not BEE, then you live each week knowing that they may decide this is a good week to get rid of you. So if you'd rather not be fired, you don't take chances -- such as giving out of the norm customer service. It's not worth it.

Not the way most people would choose to live their careers -- and yet they do. Somebody should fix that. In our family, one standing rule is: If it bothers you, fix it.

Does it bother me enough?