6
Educating the Customer

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Describe three ways to make customers right.

• Educate customers about your services and products.

• Educate customers about completing paperwork.

• Educate customers about information sources.

• Educate customers by facilitating their personal discovery process.

INTRODUCTION

The customer is not always right. You know it. We know it. In fact, studies conducted by the venerable customer service survey company e-Satisfy.com even prove it scientifically. e-Satisfy.com found that customers cause about a third of the service and product problems they complain about. Blindly believing, or acting as if you believe the customer is always right, can be detrimental to you and to your customer.

Customers-are-always-right thinking can put a stop to problem solving and customer education. You can’t correct a problem or a customer’s misconception if you can’t admit that it exists. Many times when customers cause problems—or believe untrue things—it’s because we haven’t taught them any differently. We are so familiar with the products we sell and the services we supply that we forget how much there is to know, how much we have to help our customers learn.

In this chapter, we’ll focus on educating the customer. First, we’ll discuss why “the customer is always right” kind of thinking can actually get in the way of delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service. We’ll share three ways to make customers right (One way is to educate the customer.) Then we’ll examine educating customers about services, products, paperwork, and information sources. Finally, we’ll talk about a very powerful way to educate— through personal discovery. See Exhibit 6–1, Educating Customers.

RIGHT AND WRONG

“The customer-is-always-right” thinking puts service providers in a one-down position. It says, “You’re not paid to think or ask questions. Just smile and do whatever the customer tells you to do.” No wonder that in such settings, service begins to feel like servitude: “Hello, my name is Pat and I’ll be your personal servant this evening.”

Also, blindly holding to the idea that customers are always right means that when something goes wrong—as it will, sooner or later—you must be wrong. You know that’s not true. If you’re behind the counter in a McDonald’s and a customer walks up and orders McLobster and a bottle of McChampagne, it’s very clear who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s also irrelevant. Your job is to manage the encounter so the customer continues to be a customer.

Why We’re There

The customer is our only reason for being there. Knowing that the customer is always the customer (not the problem, the enemy, or the bane of your existence) helps focus your effort where it belongs—on keeping the customer. The goal of every service transaction is, and must be, to satisfy and delight customers in ways that will keep them coming back for more.

As a service professional, you hold the power to make that happen. To do it, you need to be and act smart. You need to know more than your customer does about the products and services you sell and supply. You need to be sensitive to the fact that customers, like service professionals, are only human, with human faults and feelings. When customers are wrong, your role is to use your skills to help make them right, in a manner that neither embarrasses nor blames.

Three Ways to Make Customers Right

1. Assume Innocence

“Guilty until proved innocent” doesn’t play well with customers. Just because what they are saying sounds wrong to you, don’t assume that it is. It may be that they are simply explaining what they need or want poorly, or that the directions they should have received were missing or misleading.

“I see what happened. The computer disk is copy-protected, which is why it froze up when yon tried to copy it onto your hard drive. Unfortunately, the directions assume that you know that will happen. Here’s how we can fix things for you….”

Complete Exercise 6–1, Apply What You Learn: Guilty Until Proven Innocent.

2. Look for Teaching Opportunities

What information could your customers have used before the misunderstanding occurred? Make sure they get it now.

“I’m glad you brought this to my attention. The information you needed was here in your packet, but I can see how it would be easy to miss, buried under so many other papers. Let’s review your packet to see if I can head off any other surprises.”

3. Believe Your Customer

Sometimes, the customer you initially think is 100 percent wrong will turn out to be right after all. If you’ve ridden roughshod over their request or complaint, you’re going to find yourself wolfing down a heaping helping of humble pie. The point of Knock Your Socks Off Service is to keep customer relationships intact. When in doubt, give your customer the benefit of the doubt.

“Let’s check the advertising flyer to verify that the price you saw is for this model. … Sure enough, there it is. Thanks for pointing that out to me. I’ll make sure we get the shelf tags corrected so everyone knows which model is on sale.”

Complete Exercise 6–2, Apply What You Learn: Receiving the Benefit of the Doubt.

Unfair Advantage

What about customers who try to use your service standards against you and get something for nothing, or a better deal than they are entitled to? First, it’s important to recognize that truly dishonest customers are pretty rare. But they do exist. Much more common are customers who honestly disagree with you about what is true and what is fair.

How do you tell the difference between legitimate and deceitful customer actions? We recommend a “Three Strikes and You’re Out” policy. The first time a customer and a service professional disagree, give the customer the benefit of the doubt. Same thing the second time. But three strikes, and the customer’s credibility is gone.

Note: Making a wrong customer right, without giving away the store, can be an incredible challenge. In fact, Ron Zemke and Kristin Anderson wrote an entire book about it: Knock Your Socks Off Answers: Solving Customer Nightmares and Soothing Nightmare Customers (AMACOM, 1995).

See Exhibit 6–2, Desktop Reminder: Making Customers Right.

EDUCATING CUSTOMERS ABOUT YOUR SERVICES

Customers frequently don’t understand the time and effort that go into the work we do for them. Sometimes that’s okay. We want our contributions to have a little “It would be my pleasure” mystique about them. Going the extra mile all the time is what has won the Nordstrom’s department store chain its impressive customer loyalty and profitability. Extra added service is impressive—but there is a danger. If it becomes ordinary and expected, customers will no longer experience it as a delightful exception.

When the work we do looks effortless and easy to our customers, they may not value it. From a sales perspective, that means customers may resist paying for your expertise or assistance—after all, it was “no big deal” for you, so you shouldn’t charge much, if anything. Customers may also believe that “because it’s so easy, I should do it myself.” Customers who find that they can’t, in fact, do it themselves may blame you for the ensuing hassle and frustration.

Consider the plight of an independent lawn care and landscape expert of our acquaintance:

“While you’re mowing the lawn, could you just stick these stakes in the ground where you think the sprinkler system should he installed? I can do the rest myself.”

Your best bet: Educate your customers about the work you do. With knowledge comes appreciation of your efforts and expertise. Whenever possible, begin the education before you begin to provide the service. In the landscape industry, for example, professionals often take the property owner on an initial walk-through. At this time, they discuss what the owner would like to see done to the property, and the landscaper shares information on how those objectives will be accomplished, the number of labor hours involved, and other considerations.

“I wish it were that easy to design an automatic lawn sprinkler system. To ensure that your system works correctly—that water isn’t backing up on itself and proper pressure is maintained—we need to look more closely at the elevation of your yard. Let me show you a couple of examples and walk you through the process. Then, if you do decide to go on on your own, you’ll know what to expect?

Complete Exercise 6–3, Apply What You Learn: Educating Customers about My Service.

EDUCATING CUSTOMERS ABOUT YOUR PRODUCTS

Technology today is so advanced that in many instances yesterday’s miraculous is today’s ordinary. Think about the technology we have in our homes—the telephone, 500-channel TVs with direct satellite connections, utility meters that call in their own readings, computer chips programmed to maintain an optimal temperature for specific times of the day and customized for every room in the house. The questions we ask today are no longer “Will it ever be possible to?” but rather, “When will I be able to buy this?” Most people don’t know or even wonder how all these modern miracles work. They just plug them in, turn them on, and go.

Technomysticism

That attitude, what we call “technomysticism,” can make it difficult to provide good service for these cutting-edge, complex products. Because technology has moved or broken so many limits, customers see our offerings and capabilities as practically limitless. When we have to tell customers our technology can’t do something, they more often than not respond with a plaintive:

“But can’t you just push a button? You know, like they do on Star Trek?”

Your Best Bet: When responding to questions based in technomysticism, stop and carefully dispel the myths your customer is clinging to.

Consider the case of a market research company with which we’re familiar. Complicated statistical data analysis is run on its mini-mainframe computer system. Its customers are quite blase about the computing and data-crunching miracles the company routinely delivers. Just the same, sales and service people at the company work hard to be sure that customers understand that technology is a tool, with limits and strengths just like any other tool. For all that, however, the company still has customers who want the technomystical experience—they don’t want to understand the tools. They want dark miracles.

The market research firm’s project coordinators use a simple three-step approach to deal with their customers’ yearning for the technomystical:

• Step 1: Acknowledge the customer’s request in a positive way.

Says one project coordinator, “I used to get mad sometimes that they even asked—didn’t they know it wasn’t that easy? Then I realized that my customers often don’t know what’s involved in fulfilling their requests. And in any case, they have every right to ask for whatever they want. It’s my job to respect those requests and ensure my customers get what they need.”

• Step 2: Briefly explain the technology.

If the request is impossible, then say so and why. If it is possible but not necessarily easy or desirable, then give the customer a general idea of the amount of effort involved, using measures such as personal work hours, time, impact on other areas, and cost.

• Step 3: If the customer still wants it, then investigate how it might be delivered at a reasonable cost.

For example, a client asked Stephanie, a project coordinator, to run an analysis of customer survey data by size of the respondents’ home towns—the cities in which the respondents were born. Although an open-ended question asked each respondent for the name of his or her home town, no data about town size was collected at the time of the interview.

CLIENT:	Can’t you just feed in an almanac or something and push a button and have it all just pop out?
STEPHANIE:	I can understand why that would be interesting data to have. It would be possible to do. Let’s look at what would be involved. First, we would need to decide if we wanted to use the current population size or the size of the town at the time the respondent was born. We would then need to create a data table of all the home towns mentioned by respondents, the years of the respondents’ birth, and the population of the towns at that time. That would mean examining over 1,500 respondent files. As you might expect, that will get time-and labor-intensive and significantly add to the cost of the project. But we could do it.
CLIENT:	It was really just a passing thought. Let’s not do it this time.

It didn’t take very much discussion before this client realized the request wasn’t worth the effort. Letting the customer have the final say leaves the customer’s sense of control intact.

Filling Knowledge Gaps

Many times there are gaps in the customer’s knowledge about your product or service. We make assumptions—often, wrong assumptions—about how much our customers already know and understand about using our products and services. So when we hear a question about something we think of as common knowledge, we should recognize it as an opportunity to provide a little customer education—provided, of course, that the customer isn’t too upset to be in a teachable moment.

A common situation in the photo processing business is the “red-eyes syndrome.” Some customers insist, “You must have processed the film wrong!” when they see red dots where their children’s pupils should be. Instead of dismissing such customers as obvious amateurs, smart photo professionals say something like:

“Hmm, may I take a look at those? You’re right, the eyes are definitely red. What type of camera are you using? I see. I think I can explain what’s happening to cause this—it’s not a processing issue. There is a simple trick I use to fix the red-eye thing when it happens to my pictures. I just take a black felt-tip pen and….”

Complete Exercise 6–4, Apply What You Learn: Filling Customer Knowledge Gaps.

EDUCATE ABOUT COMPLETING PAPERWORK

Paperwork—forms, statements, invoices—that make perfect sense to us and fit our business processes and systems may be unintelligible or confusing to customers. Just think for a moment about the forms we all fill out for the Internal Revenue Service. Although the IRS tries to make its forms and their instructions as simple as possible, most taxpayers approach them with a sense of dread. Forty percent of us even go so far as to pay someone else to fill them out for us.

While few businesses are as complicated as the IRS, confusion over forms and statements is still relatively common. It is rare that we encounter a form or statement so well designed that it is clearly understood by every customer who sees it. Frontline service professionals tell us they are frequently asked:

“How can I fill this out if I don’t understand it?”

In these circumstances it’s tempting to simply fill out the form for the customer—sometimes that seems to be the easiest, least time-consuming solution. For a one-time form for a one-time customer, that may be true. But beware; you may accidentally build a customer dependency you could come to regret. In order to determine your best course of action, you need first to determine whether the customer is genuinely puzzled or is simply resisting, and possibly resenting, being asked to fill out the paperwork. If the customer truly doesn’t understand, your best bet is to take the time to explain and clarify. Make this an instructive act that leaves the customer feeling comfortable with the document.

“These mortgage application forms are quite lengthy. When I first saw them I thought they looked more complicated than doing my taxes! But they really aren’t that bad. Let me walk you through them.”

As preparation for this kind of coaching, go through your most commonly used forms and note the parts that were confusing to you when you were new to your job or the form was first introduced. What do customers stop and ask questions about? Are there portions of the form that are frequently completed incorrectly or incompletely by customers?

Confusion exists not only in the forms we ask customers to fill out but in the statements we send to customers. A financial services company we’ve worked with completed a system-wide forms redesign in response to pleas from brokers and sales assistants for “statements that make sense to our clients.” Even so, some of the brokers and financial planners went on to create their own statements, which they mail to their biggest and best accounts along with the standard company statement. These special statements were personally tailored to present information in the way that best met the needs of each individual customer. Yes, they did take time to create, but for these brokers, meeting the idiosyncratic needs of important key customers was well worth the effort.

EDUCATE ABOUT INFORMATION SOURCES

Sometimes customers ask questions that are reasonable and understandable— but you haven’t a ghost of an answer. In these cases, your best course of action is to direct the customer to a more appropriate resource.

Consider the customer service professionals of a western power company. Every year they can count on several calls from citizens asking,

“What kind offish are in the reservoir? And what are they bitingon?”

Rather than take on a role for which they have no expertise, the customer service professionals have created a response that directs the caller to a better source of information without offending:

“Good question! The reservoir ecosystem is managed by the state Department of Natural Resources. I happen to have their number right here. They should be able to help you. Hope you catch a big one!”

Complete Exercise 6–5, Apply What You Learn: “I’m So Bad at Math!”

EDUCATE THROUGH PERSONAL DISCOVERY

Our colleague Chip Bell suggests educating through “personal discovery.” Don’t say, “You did this wrong and see what happened?!” Your customer will resent and resist your conclusions. Instead, outline the situation and the facts, then shut up and let the customer draw his or her own conclusion. It’s a principle of human learning that we remember best the things we discover for ourselves.

SERVICE TECHNICIAN:	According to the diagnostic we just completed, the printer and the computer are communicating without a problem when we print through DOS. But when we go into Windows we experience a problem. Can you think of any changes you’ve made recently to your computer or the way you use it?
CUSTOMER:	Well, I did load a new screen-saver program. I guess it never happened before I loaded that program.
SERVICE TECHNICIAN:	That could just be our problem.

Building Customer Understanding

There are times when customers don’t know they are being less than bright about a situation. Keep the secret, and treat them with respect. If later the customer figures it out, they’ll save face with the thought “At least the service provider didn’t realize I was acting so silly.” And if customers never figure it out, well, that’s okay, too.

Police, fire, and emergency rescue services often receive calls from well-meaning people who think they are having an emergency. Requests like: “Can you rescue my cat from the tree?” While this may be a serious emergency from the pet owner’s perspective, it’s minor compared to robberies, burning buildings, and highway accidents.

Not too long ago we worked with a terrific crew of 911 dispatchers. As you know, this life-saving service is designed to handle the most critical of human emergency calls—crime in progress, threat to human life, officer needing assistance. But, as you might suspect, not every call that comes into a 911 line fits that description. Yet all dispatchers know that if you alienate a citizen because one particular call isn’t a true emergency, that citizen may not call back when there is a legitimate, life-endangering emergency. The dispatcher’s solution: Treat the caller with respect and offer all possible assistance, while treating him or her to a little live action sound from “real emergencies.”

“Is this 911? My kitty is caught in a tree. Send someone out right away—I just don’t know what to do!”

“Are there any people in danger? (Siren: Whoop! Whoop!) I’m sorry, I’m dispatching an ambulance. We are the first call for crimes in progress, suspicious behavior, and medical emergencies. Hold please (several seconds pass). Please call the Humane Society for your kitty—the number is 555–5555, and thank you for keeping 911 by your phone.”

BUILDING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH EDUCATION

Education builds strong customer relationships. It empowers your customers, making them smart buyers and effective users of your products and services. The dialogue that develops between you and your customer builds trust and a strong two-way communication channel through which you and your organization obtain valuable feedback about your product and services as well as innovative ideas. Having a smart customer makes your job easier. And when you take the time to teach others, you become a smarter service representative yourself. That’s because the teacher often learns more than the student. It’s no wonder that educating the customer is a vital component of Knock Your Socks Off Service.

Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shall find it returned after many days.

—Ecclesiastes 11:1

In this chapter you learned

• The customer is not always right. Many times when customers cause problems, it’s because we haven’t taught them any differently.

• When customers are wrong, your role is to help make them right, in a way that neither embarrasses nor blames. To make customers right assume innocence, look for teaching opportunities, and believe your customer.

• Customers need to be educated about the nature of your services, how to use products, how to complete paperwork, and where to find further information.

• Watch for “teachable moments.” You can’t educate the irate. While customers are stressed and angry, they do not take kindly to reeducation.

• It’s a principle of human learning that we remember best the things we discover for ourselves. So, rather than lecturing or blaming the customer, outline the situation and the facts, then let the customer draw his or her own conclusion—a process known as educating through personal discovery.