Cool Down (6 page)

Great customer service
is
about getting back to the customer promptly, certainly, but it is also about getting back to him with a solution, an opportunity, something that will continue to substantiate in the customer's mind the value of doing business with you as opposed to your competitor down the street, around the world, or in the next office. Excellent customer service requires something that will further the relationship and open up new avenues of opportunity together—in a word, depth.

Information overload caused by speed also tends to obscure the notion of what
customer service
actually means. It's essential when defining this term to make sure that in addition to our own definition of the term, we clearly understand how our customers would define it. This is what Michael Eisner was referring to in his email speech quoted earlier. It takes time to learn how to communicate with, and then
know
a customer. In other words, great customer service must be based on great
customer comprehension
. Let's look at an example: Does answering an email the moment it comes in, or answering a ringing phone before the second ring constitute great customer service? It might, but then again, in some professions such reactions might be an indication that you're not busy enough, and therefore you're not the best in your field. What about people who respond to an emailed inquiry on their wireless PDA at 10:30 p.m.? Will such an action be indispensable to your customer, or will it tell him that you are working over-long hours, potentially burning out, and therefore likely unavailable for a long-term quality relationship? The point is this: Do you know where your customers sit on this issue? Have you taken the time to ask them? Or are you too busy to find out?

Speed is not the sole indicator of quality. When you go out to dinner at an upscale restaurant, you would expect the waiter to serve you immediately, because that's central to his role. But you would not expect your order to be delivered immediately. Instead, we hold to the belief that a professional, competent chef will take reasonable time to prepare and plate the meal properly, with the attention to detail that makes the dining experience at this restaurant much more enjoyable than at the fast food joint down the street. The strength of your company's reputation no doubt rests as much on the quality of your products and services as it does with the relationships you have with customers. It would be expected, therefore, that the company work to maintain this level of excellence. Information overload distorts our ability to do the research and make mindful decisions to uphold this standard. It forces people into a mental state in which they feel they
must
reciprocate at the same pace as the incoming stimulus, and that's what gets them stuck inside the silo.

Leanne is unhappy. Over the course of one evening, between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., a certain client called her three times, leaving three messages and later, two emails, each with the same message. Upon returning her calls the next morning, Leanne spoke to this client, who voiced his dissatisfaction that it had taken her so long to respond. The next time the client called her, it was during the day,
during a funeral that he was attending.
Again Leanne felt guilty about not being sufficiently available.

What would you do with a person like this? How does this tie in with the ideas of customer service? What advice would you give?

 

Leanne's reaction was that perhaps she should be available 24/7, in order to avoid ruffling this customer's feathers again. My advice to Leanne was the opposite. I suggested she not let this trend continue. There will always be demanding people in the world, people who work at a different pace and different hours. But to fall in line unquestioningly means giving up autonomy, and worse, conditioning this person to expect the same type of treatment every time. No evening or weekend will ever be safe again. This, to me, is not customer service. It's an example of Boxer's “death-in-harness” brought about by speed. I suggested she explain to this customer that she would be happy to deal with late evening issues if they were truly emergencies, but that the high quality of work that he is paying for is best produced during the day. I would suggest also that she ask this client for more information about his timelines and priorities, in order to manage his expectations in advance rather than as they happen. By taking the time to learn more about her client, possibly identifying him as a workaholic, or merely a stressed or disorganized businessperson, Leanne would be in a far better position to anticipate his needs and prepare accordingly. This is the kind of communication and understanding you just can't get through email.

My second piece of advice was for Leanne to pause and take some time to assess this customer's overall value. Sometimes the cost of maintaining a client can be too high. Leanne was not able to grasp this until I explained that the cost should not be viewed in terms of the relationship with that particular client, but in terms of what it is doing to all of her other client relationships—the ones she can no longer maintain correctly owing to the incessant demands of this one individual. This is typical of the way in which the silo effect brought on by information overload wreaks its havoc by preventing us from seeing ourselves from the outside.

The addiction to speed goes further than just the hard-wired need to respond to individual messages and clients. It has insinuated itself even further under our collective skin to the point that even when there is no email or voicemail message demanding immediate response, a craving still lurks. It's the need to stay “in the loop.”

This is an obsession, a very human one. As I described earlier, a great many people yield to the temptation to check in and read their email moments before going to bed, simply because they have the technology to do so. Or they check it during their kid's school recital, or during a meeting, or in a restaurant or movie theatre. Some call in to the office for messages while driving. (This latter example, of using a cell phone while driving, has been proven to deliver the same degree of functional impairment as does a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent, which is the standard of defining impaired driving in most states and provinces.
²
) The call of the loop even makes a walk between point A and point B feel like wasted time if our wireless PDA or cell phone is not activated and used along the way.

These people will even check into the office while they're on vacation, sometimes sending the rest of the family off to enjoy themselves, while they stay in the hotel room, tending to the loop. Surely this isn't because they find their work to be preferable to spending time with their children. It's because they fear the repercussions of not being there. Work or customer issues might escalate into problems in their absence, and then one of two things might happen:

People who feel the pressure or the desire to always stay in this loop should take care to note that a loop is much like a hamster wheel, with no beginning and no end. It does not guarantee progress. Instead, it guarantees a constant revisiting of the same surface-level problems and delays, eliminating along the way any possibility for longer-term creative resolution. Such a loss of control can actually result in the obligation to stay in the loop actually being imposed by others, not just by yourself. Consider the following case study.

Mary works for a large organization. Like many of her colleagues she receives a large number of emails per day from customers who have questions or requests. Many of these people send their messages with the “Read Receipt” feature attached, which informs them the moment Mary has opened and read their letter. Mary already knows that it makes sense to assign all but the most important emails to specific time blocks in the day, rather than answering each the moment it arrives. She knows all about the value and power of focus. Unfortunately, her customers don't. If they do not receive a response back within five minutes, they pick up the phone and call, and if Mary doesn't answer, they go straight to her manager. And that's Mary's fear. “If you don't stay inside the loop,” she says, “the problem merely escalates to another level.” Hence, the fear factor. Mary's fear of stepping out of the loop creates a silo, in which she feels obliged to respond, not just because of a hard-wired biological reflex, but because of the dangerous implications inherent in not answering. Who needs the hassle of annoyed clients, colleagues, or managers?

What is the solution? Well, what if Mary were to take a different tack? To use an outdoorsy metaphor, instead of spending 100 percent of her time fending off mosquitoes, would it not make more sense to buy a tent? Would it not be better if she reduced the pace of her busy week (at select times, anyway) and invested some of her time in sitting down with her manager (the one to whom the calls get escalated), to explain the reasons for her time allotments, the value of the work she prefers to focus on, her strategies for returning the customers' calls, and her plans for satisfying their needs, even if it's a few minutes or half an hour after their call? Could she not seek to get her manager on side, or perhaps collaborate towards a joint strategy? Could she not also spend a little time touching base with her mentors, either inside or outside the organization, to compare notes and to learn how others keep both their job and their sanity in the face of relentless expectations? This solution would be eminently possible, for Mary, as well as for the vacationers, and all other prisoners of the loop if they were to
cool down
and use the power of
slow
to maximize their use of human-to-human communication as a practical antidote to the speed of expectation.

The ripple effect of Information Overload, combined with the fear of being out of the loop, has led to a productivity loss phenomenon known as
presenteeism
, in which people come to work even though they are fatigued, ill, or overstressed—partly out of the fear of losing their job, and partly, once again, of not being in touch with the expected momentum of their work. Presenteeism is a term coined by Manchester University psychologist Cary Cooper. He describes it as like absenteeism in all respects except for the fact that the employee in question is physically at the workplace instead of home in bed.

Employees do not have to be actually ill or paralyzed with stress to experience presenteeism. Consider:

These are all examples of presenteeism that combine our fear of repercussions with a perceived obligation to keep going inside the loop. This has led to legions of professionals showing up at their place of work every day, and despite their best efforts, they just can't function fully. The short-term results are sometimes obvious, for example, when meetings go off track or tasks are not completed on time, but sometimes they are less so, since it's not always easy to perceive optimum and sub-optimum performance when standing in the midst of it.

In Chapter 1, I used the example of early morning gasoline in reference to the viscosity of the thinking process at select times of the day. It is appropriate to extend the automotive analogy at this point by drawing attention to the gauge that most cars have on their instrument panel, called a
tachometer
, which indicates the number of revolutions per minute the engine is doing. There is an optimum zone at which your car has been designed to operate best, usually when it's in top gear and cruising along an open road without needing to stop and start constantly.

If we, as human beings, were able to incorporate a similar gauge on our own foreheads, one that registered the amount of our mental potential and throughput, we would hope that it stayed most of the time in a similar type of “optimum zone,” perhaps within 75 to 90 percent capacity. We could really do with a gauge like that because we lack any other reliable form of quantifying mental capacity on a minute-by-minute basis. We would be surprised to learn, however, just how often the needle dips down into regions much lower than that. Distraction and disruptions force the brain's own thinking patterns to regularly re-set and rebuild. Presenteeism, caused by speed, fatigue, stress, and worry, forces the needle backwards to a zone far below what is desired and expected. Such a gauge would clearly illustrate the cost of our reaction to high-speed expectation. It's the human equivalent of driving with the handbrake on.