After the complaint has been handled; once you’ve addressed the customer’s problem and left them more than happy with the result – so happy that they’ll tell their friends about what went wrong and how you put it right for them so well. After all that, there is one more job to do.
Make sure you update the way you Keep your Promise so that you don’t get the same complaint again.
Amend your Customer Experience Score.
The people you want to serve – the clients you’d like to have – don’t know what you know. They don’t believe what you believe. They look at the world through different eyes, a different experience and with a different mindset.
That’s what makes marketing hard. Especially if you are offering something different from the norm.
It’s the same for the people you work with. They don’t know what you know. They don’t believe what you believe. They bring their own experience and mindset to the way they see the world.
That’s what makes running a business – serving clients through other people – hard.
The difference is that the people you work have to do what you tell them, don’t they? After all, you’re paying them. They need a job.
Except that all too often what actually happens is that you spend more time on watching over them than on the business. Micro-managing. Because your unique definition of ‘customer experience‘ is entirely in your head. Which is frustrating for everyone, and constraining for the business.
So you delegate the micro-management to someone else. Who doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t necessarily believe what you believe. Who sees the world through different eyes, with a different mindset. Who tells your people what to do, based on what’s in their head. Sure it takes a load off your back, but will your unique customer experience survive the change?
I believe there is a better way. Which is to document the customer experience in your head and make it available for everyone in the business to follow.
Not ‘what to do‘, but ‘what has to happen‘.
Not ‘how to do it‘, but ‘how it needs to feel for the client‘.
Not just ‘this is how we do things round here’ but also ‘this is what we believe‘.
So that you are not just handing over the ‘donkey work’, but also the emotional labour of delivering the business’s unique customer experience – the part that really matters to the client, the part they pay extra for, the part they refer their friends to.
Then work out and document how that customer experience is maintained, how you make sure that everyone who works with you knows what you know and believes most of what you believe, so that you know you can trust them to use their own history and mindset to make that customer experience even better, in line with the beliefs you all share.
It’s quite a job to get all this in place*. But once you have it running and growing your business gets easier and easier. Because everyone working the business is standing in for you. Everyone’s a boss.
And not a manager in sight.
*That’s what I do. Talk to me.
It may not feel like it, but when a customer complains about your service, they are demonstrating that they care.
If they feel let down, it’s because they feel they have a human relationship with you. One they value highly enough to fight for. What you do in response can make or break that relationship. So you want be doing it on purpose.
That means it pays to make handling complaints part of your Customer Experience Score.
Obviously you can’t predict exactly what might go wrong for a customer, so this is not about predetermining specific solutions to specific problems. Instead it’s a higher-level process that can be applied to any situation.
The process starts by acknowledging the person’s emotions as well as the facts. However unreasonable it may be for the person in front of you to feel what they feel, they still feel it. And while they are feeling, they can’t be thinking. What they need first is to be seen or heard as a human being, to have their anger/distress/disappointment recognised as valid responses to being let down.
This doesn’t mean coming out with the bland ‘I’m sorry you feel that way‘ kind of statement – the kind that’s usually followed by a ‘but’ – ‘but we don’t do refunds‘. I mean genuine sympathy – ‘Gosh yes, I would be hopping mad too!‘, ‘Blimey that must have been sooo frustrating.‘ – the kind of sympathy that enables the complainer to recover enough equanimity to move on. Once you have achieved that, you can acknowledge the facts of what’s happened, without admitting liability.
The next stage is to find out what will make the complainer happy again. What will repair, or even strengthen your relationship with them. You need to be able to offer a solution that is right for both of you. That means collaboration between you. That starts by asking them ‘What could we do to make this right for you?‘, then continuing to explore what they would feel is reasonable, without committing to anything at this stage. Bear in mind knock-on effects of the service failure – perhaps something else was damaged as a result, or they had to take time off work to come and see you. Also bear in mind what is affordable for you. It’s worth understanding the lifetime value of a customer, as well as the value of this particular transaction.
By the end of this stage, you have a pretty good idea of what would restore your customer’s faith in the relationship.
Now top it. Offer a solution that will exceed their expectations, without breaking the bank. This often involves addressing the collateral damage – for example if a pan breaks in normal use, you’d expect to replace it, if in breaking the contents spoilt a tablecloth, you could offer to replace that too. If they travelled out of their way by public transport to make a complaint, you could send them home in a cab. It’s this kind of thing that tips a complainer into an advocate for your business. Remember, they are complaining because they care.
Finally, deliver on the promise, without hesitation.
This process only works when the people running it fully understand the profit margins and lifetime values for your business.
Make sure they know it, and you can let them be creative in coming up with solutions, no matter what the complaint.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
My interest in documenting how things should work came from my years in software development. To me, it always seemed sensible to work out what you wanted your software to do before you built it, or bought it.
And even more sensible that it should reflect the way you do business rather than an average of hundreds of other firms.
Writing a customer Experience Score before you commission software has other benefits too.
It gets everyone thinking about change – ‘how we really want it to work’ rather than simply ‘how we do it now’.
It gets everyone thinking a level up from the day-to-day, about what has to happen when rather than how it happens.
But most of all it gives everyone, including you, the chance to reframe your business from a management hierarchy to an easily replicable system for making and keeping promises.
And the benefits keep coming after you’re done. Once you can demonstrate that your unique system for making and keeping promises works consistently, people will ask you to do more of it for them. And you will find it easy to scale up on delivery.
Like many a human enterprise, the hard work is all up front, but worth it for the dividends flying in later, almost effortlessly.
And isn’t that just what it means to be an entrepreneur?
One aspect of life you rarely see in on-screen dramatisations of Jane Austen and other period fiction, is mending. Yet when you read the novels, it’s obvious that women of all ages and classes spent a lot of their time doing it.
Mending is necessary, but has never been sexy, so if we can get away with it, we’ll do a quick running repair, so we can get back to the interesting stuff. Until suddenly our mending no longer resembles the elegant well-fitting garment we first created for ourselves. We’d be ashamed to wear it anywhere in public.
It’s the same when it comes to our Customer Experience. As a one-man band we create an elegant, well-fitting experience that closely reflects our vision and values – ‘the way we do things round here’. But over time, we patch it up, let it out or take it in to suit a particular expediency – until suddenly we find it’s looking rather shabby.
Much better to embrace the need for repair. Make sure all repairs enhance the original garment and you can proudly leave them visible. Part of it’s history and evolution.
Not shabby. Just the most comfortable thing you can wear.
Long, long ago, a young hominid female let her mother look after her baby while she went off and hunted, opening the evolutionary pathway to homo sapiens.
The ability to trust other people with our precious babies is literally what makes us human. The result is big brains, grandmothers and a propensity to collaborate.
Delegating the care for your Customer Experience should come naturally.
So what’s holding you back?
When you’re a one-man band it has to be personal. Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t keep it that way if you plan to seriously scale. It’s almost a definition of ‘corporate’ that ‘I’ becomes ‘they’.
I believe that this loss of the personal is part of what puts many micro-business owners off growth, not the ‘lack of ambition’ ascribed to them, by government reports.
Conventional wisdom is not wrong – as the business founders insert layers of hierarchy and function between themselves and their customers, the relationship between business and customer can often feel impersonal, transactional. A brand, no matter how great, isn’t a person.
What’s wrong is the assumption that introducing functions and hierarchies is the only way to scale.
What if, at that point where 10-ish people work with you, you decided to make them all ‘the boss’- each one of them capable and authorised to deliver on your promises the way you do?
What if, instead of splitting the customer experience into separate functions, you kept it intact from end to end and made each and every person in the business responsible for delivering it to their clients?
What if, instead of introducing layers of management to distract your team from your customers, you gave them a Customer Experience Score to follow and let them manage themselves? With responsbility for the consequences of course.
You’d scale your business and keep it personal. It’s just that the person your clients deal wouldn’t have to be you.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Intrigued? Ask me how.
Dogma: a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted.
As a boss, in a moment of frustration, you may feel that this is what you want. And if you lock all decision-making into your systems and processes, you’ll get it.
Dogma scales, but it doesn’t evolve, and it frequently gets subverted. If ‘computer says no‘ to often for my liking, I might just stop asking the computer.
If you want your business to outlast you and retain your vision, it’s better to create space for dissent, debate and experiment. After all, dissent, debate and experiments are where discovery originates.
Use your systems and processes to create a floor that defines the minimum experience. Guide your people with a small number of big principles. Then let them spread the word in their own way.
You never know, you might just found a new religion.
Not many people know this.
I’m an anarchist.
I believe in autonomy and self-determination. I don’t believe that anyone has the right to tell anyone else what to do – except in rare cases where doing so might save a person’s life.
I also believe in collaboration and co-operation – the getting together of autonomous individuals to achieve something much bigger than themselves.
To co-operate successfully, participants need to know what they have to do. They need to know when it has to be done. But that knowledge doesn’t have to come from someone telling them as they go. It can come from a shared ‘document’ everyone can access, whenever they need to.
That’s why I like the idea of a business as an orchestra.
Often, when people think of an orchestra, they focus on the conductor. But the conductor isn’t there to tell players what to do, they’re there to help them keep time, and to provide hints to aid this particular interpretation. It’s up to each player to choose how to get the right sound out of their instrument at the right time. What has to happen, when, is recorded by the composer in a score.
The conductor is a role, like a cellist or percussionist, not a position in a hierarchy. In fact it’s perfectly possible to run a succesful orchestra without a conductor – you simply get people to take turns.
What really pulls an orchestra together is the score – a map of the sound experience to be created for an audience.
The person behind the score is the composer. They’re the one whose legacy lasts longest, and scales furthest.
So if you’re an employer, and like me, you have a problem with being told what to do, consider rethinking your role.
How could you make yourself a conductor rather than a boss?
Or even better, how could you make yourself a composer?
Hint: talk to me about becoming a Disappearing Boss.
This book, ‘Alchemy’ was recommended to me by the talented Andrea Horgan, (along with ‘Evolutionary Ideas‘) so of course I had to interrupt my current reading for it.
It’s a useful and entertaining read, and so far I’d sum up the findings thus:
I’d add:
It’s not magic, it’s simply focusing on the human. But not many people do that.