The other evening around 9.05 pm I get a call from an over enthusiastic sales person of an AI in Marketing company. No preamble, no polite enquiries but cutting to the chase with a sense of entitlement that cried out aloud ” that I am obliged to take his call, irrespective of the time, the context or what have you “. That is not it. When I asked him that is this a time to be making a sales call and how disappointed I am at being subjected to this unwanted intrusion, he had the audacity to tell me that it is company policy and it is NOT his responsibility to check on primary courtesies. Even when I reassured him that I will never do business with his company, he kept on saying that he is ‘doing his job ‘.
This is a classic template of the mindset of most(there are some exceptions fortunately) corporate customer acquisition | service personnel where they love doing either or ideally both of the below:-
– If at all possible, evade responsibility
– When you can, get it over with
So, when things go wrong and you want a response, it normally is this refrain ” It’s out of our control “.
There’s a flip side to this which is a far better alternative. Think of what you ‘could have ‘ done under the circumstances. Instead of hanging on to the coat tails of minimum legal and compliance, run away from the responsibility and under deliver and disappoint the customer( and lose her forever), explore what the maximum you can do to understand, empathise and resolve the customer’s problem. Like owning up and saying, we could have done better. We could have informed you and given a true update on the ground situation instead of hiding behind the customary ” there was a technical glitch “, ” it’s another department that is responsible ” etc etc.
So the next time you say ” let me escalate this to my manager “, actually do it, send good advice upstream, follow up and offer the customer perspective to find a solution and not follow the call centre script(designed to ensure customer problems are not resolved).
It is simple- organisations who win the race are the ones who are going way beyond the minimum( read this example of what happened with the Titanic to understand the gravity of what can go wrong when you opt for the safe and minimum), the ones that figure out that they could do it.
What could you do?