Latest / The Scott Townsend Show / #258 Customer Service As A Practice
Transcript
- Scott M Townsend: Welcome to the Scott Townsend Show, brought to you by Diet Soman Productions. The phrase customer service has become such a cliche that I'm not sure we even hear it anymore. Every company talks about it, every break room has a poster about it, every training video tells us how important it is. We've heard that every department is the customer service department, and the customer service department is every department. We've heard that the customer comes first. And none of those ideas are necessarily wrong. But when a phrase gets repeated often enough, it can lose its meaning. It becomes corporate wallpaper. It's where it's there, but nobody really looks at it anymore. So I've been trying to find another way to think about customer service, one that lifts it out of the world of shopping malls, checkout lines. Name tags, hourly wages, and complaint counters. Not because there is anything wrong with those things, but because the work deserves to be viewed in a more professional and admirable way. So here's the idea I keep coming back to. Those of us who work with customers have a customer service practice. So hear me out here. A doctor has a medical practice. A lawyer has a law practice. We don't hear that language and assume the doctor is pretending to be a doctor or that the lawyer is still trying to figure out how court works. We understand that practicing means applying a body of knowledge to real situations and continuing to learn while doing it. The word practice is interesting, I think, because it also makes us think about sports. A baseball player Practices hitting, a pitcher practices throwing strikes, a basketball player shoots the same free throw hundreds of times. A musician practices scales and an actor, you know, rehearses the same scene over and over again. And why? Because none of them reaches a point where improvement is no longer possible. They may become excellent, they may become professionals. They may even become the best in the world, but they still practice. Doctors are the same way. No doctor has ever stood up and said, Well, that's it. We have completely figured out the human body. We can cure everybody every time. Medicine changes, new research appears, treatments improve. Each patient brings a different history and a different set of circumstances. Lawyers practice too because the law changes. Society changes, and no two cases are exactly alike. They study the law as it stands today, apply it to the situation in front of them, and use their experience to make the best judgment they can. Customer service works the same way. No two customers are exactly alike. One person wants you to walk. them directly to the product. Another would rather you point toward the aisle and let ⁓ figure it out. One customer wants every detail. Another wants the shortest possible answer maybe. One person arrives cheerful and patient and the next walks in frustrated because a project has already gone wrong three times. You can memorize the policies, you can learn the products, you can watch all the training videos But eventually you have to stand in front of an actual person and decide how best to help them. That is where the practice begins. If I say that I have a customer service practice, it changes how I see my work. I'm not just waiting for somebody to ask where the air filters are. I'm developing the ability to recognize what a person needs, communicate clearly, and help solve a problem. Sometimes the customer doesn't know the name of what they need. They just know the toilet keeps running, the paint is peeling, or a piece broke off the lawnmower. They may describe it incorrectly. They may bring in a blurry picture that can call apart that little round thing that goes behind the other thing. And now the work becomes a combination of knowledge. You've got to do some investigation and translation. You gotta ask questions. You listen for clues, you determine whether they need a product, instructions, a repair person, or simply an honest answer that says I don't know, but let me find someone who does. That takes skill. It also takes judgment. Serving a customer does not mean, you know, agreeing to everything a customer asks asks for. A doctor serves a patient, but that doesn't mean prescribing whatever the patient demands. A lawyer serves a client, but that doesn't mean promising an outcome that cannot be delivered. In the same way, good customer service is not saying yes to everything. Sometimes service means explaining a limitation. Sometimes it means enforcing a policy fairly. Sometimes it means preventing somebody from From buying the wrong product, even when the wrong one costs more. Real service is not giving people whatever they want, it is helping them arrive at the best reasonable outcome. Thinking of customer service as a practice also changes the way we think about mistakes. When an interaction goes badly, the question shouldn't only be who messed up? It should also be what can I learn from this? Did I interrupt too quickly? Did I assume I understood the problem? Did I explain the situation or the policy without explaining the reason behind it? Did I hand the customer off to somebody else and then forget about them? Did I allow my frustration with the previous customer to affect the next one? That doesn't excuse poor behavior or remove accountability. Practice only works when we are honest about our performance. Athletes watch game film because memory is unreliable. And we want to see what actually happened, not what they hoped happened. We can do the same thing after a customer interaction, replay it, identify the moment where things changed, decide what to do differently next time. That's practice. And the next customer. Is the next repetition. You gotta get your reps in. The other thing I like about this idea is that it restores some dignity to the work. Retail jobs are often talked about as if they are temporary, unskilled, or somehow less important than jobs performed behind closed doors or in cubicles. But anyone who has worked with the public knows that serving people well. requires emotional control, product knowledge, communication, problem solving, patience, and adaptability, often all within the same five minute conversation. You may be helping an experienced contractor at ten o'clock and someone attempting their first home repair at ten. ⁓ You have to adjust without making either person feel dismissed or talked down to. That is professional work. The paycheck or job title does not determine whether you behave like a professional. Your approach does. If customer service is my practice, then I should keep learning my craft. I should know more about my department next month than I know today. I should become better at asking questions. I should pay attention to how people respond. I should learn to explain complicated things simply. I should be a dependable enough that my coworkers and customers trust me. And just like any other practice, some days will go better than others. A doctor can have a difficult case. A lawyer can lose an argument. An athlete may miss the shot. A customer service professional can say the wrong thing, misunderstand the problem. Or fail to deliver the experience that they intended. The answer is not to shrug and say, well, people are impossible. The answer is to return to the practice, learn, adjust, and try again. Maybe that is what has been missing from the phrase customer service. We have treated it as a department, a score, a survey result, or a slogan. But customer service is something more personal than that. It is a craft we develop through thousands of small interactions. It is the practice of paying attention, the practice of listening before answering. It's the practice of knowing when to speak confidently and when to admit that we need help. The practice of hearing the person in front of us as a human being instead of the next task in line. We will never do it perfectly. Nobody does. That is exactly why the word practice fits. So maybe the next time someone asks what you do, you don't have to say, I just work retail or I'm only in customer service. You can think of it differently. You have a customer service practice. And every day you show up Meet the public and try to serve people a little better than you did yesterday, you're practicing your profession. Hey, this is Scott Townsend. Thanks for listening to the Scott Townsend show. Have a great day. Everything's gonna be all right. And we'll talk to you later. For more episodes, visit the Scott Townsend Show YouTube channel, listen on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.