Spokesperson
An incident at work today made me have one of those aha moments. Now I’m sure, in fact darn near positive it isn’t new, but it is for me so there! What happened doesn’t matter ecept for me to say that I went over someone’s head, right to the two primary owners, and got chewed out royally for it by the person whose head I went over. Fortunately the owners thought I was in the right on this. The details are irrelevant suffice it to say that I went to bat for a customer and that’s what gave me my little aha moment.
Most of my adult working life I have been involved in customer service in one way or another and fought hard to give people the best service I could. The one thing that I don’t see in companies is someone who’s primary responsibility is to be an advocate for customers with problems. By advocate I don’t means someone on a help desk or a complaint department who is goingto just go through the standard question/response routine; look it up in the manual and parrot back stuff then kick it to his or her supervisor if the customer whines too much. No, I mean someone who when convinced the customer, no matter how obnoxious or weaselish that customer may be, is right, will go all the way to the top of the company if necessary for redress. Sort of an ombudsperson but more on the side of the customer rather than neutral. Whether this person has other responsibilities or not will depend on the size of the company etc. It should however be an official position in a company and one where everyone knows this person has permission to scale it up the ladder as necessary, so keep your egos in check. One possible outcome of this is that everyone will give better service because they know they may look bad if the complaint has to go over their head to get resolved. This is real employee empowerment.
All things being equal, a company that takes that kind of stand will ultimately prevail over its competitors because you just can’t beat good customer service. It is fortunate for me that I have worked for the owners in several other companies and they know I wouldn’t have done what I did if I wasn’t absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do. If I was in a different company I’d probably be looking for work now and the company would have lost a customer.
Companies make mistakes, and the larger they get the more mistakes get made., basic law of averages. The trick is to be willling to admit it when you’ve erred (but be certain you have erred) , fix it and then move on when the customer is satisfied or you’ve done everything reasonable to satisfy the customer.
What do you think?
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Comment from pericat
Time: 10/25/2004, 11:38 pm
What I think is that there’s a flip side to being a firebranding customer advocate, and that shows up if the CA begins habitually treating co-workers as adversaries. I work with a couple of sales reps like that, who approach every delivery as if those of us supplying the goods were cavalier slovens who would never shift a hair of our heads to support ‘his’ customer if he didn’t address us so from the get-go. Makes for a lot of unneeded stress; after all, they’re my customers, too.