Sorry, but your customers don't care if you're sorry. | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but your customers don't care if you're sorry.

uservoice.com

18 pointsevanhamilton18 comments

> Guess what: your customer doesn’t care how your system works.

This, absolutely. I once experienced a long, drawn-out fiasco with a major department store in which they compounded numerous screw-ups and oversights with consistently rude, unhelpful service and constant referrals from one department to another. "No, sir, you're talking to customer service for sales. You need to be talking to customer service for sales and support. Here's the number."

In my final, desperate email to the company's senior management team, which motivated someone with the power to fix the issue to intervene, I noted the insanity of a customer having to learn the company's internal organizational structure and process flow just to get their order fixed.

A company's customer service interface should be a black-box API: customer request goes in, and a reasonable response comes out. I shouldn't have to know or care what you have to do internally to make it happen.

Mine do. They know we're doing complex, cutting-edge work and appreciate what's involved. They have a tolerance for problems and understand that their other alternatives have drawbacks, occasional failures and limitations as well.

They appreciate "sorry" and tell me so, and appreciate transparency into our failures and shortcomings when they occur.

Sorry, but employees don't care that customers don't care that the company is sorry.

In other words: you're right, but frontline employees are rarely motivated or trained to solve small issues in outside-the-box ways like this. At some places they're actively forbidden to do anything outside the officially approved way of doing things.

This is definitely the cause of such situations. Yes, changing the routine might only cost a quarter, but the end employee has no reason to want to go out of his way to help; he is compensated for standing there each hour, not for finding creative solutions to problems. Now, assuming it is actually an employee who cares, we deal with the assumption the manager/supervisor will actually allow people to step outside the box. In my experience, this is a non-starter. Managers and supervisors at places like this tend to be the original front-line employees who weren't able to actually get out of there, implying that they also cannot think outside the box.

Great point. That's why company culture is important - you need to have frontline employees who care. Probably not going to happen at the bakery, sadly, but something you CAN build into a startup.

This article made me angry....

The writer went into a bakery and was treated pleasantly enough by someone who likely makes minimum wage. In environments like bakeries, or food service, staff are usually taught 'obey, obey, obey' or get fired. How many options do you think this fellow has? Do you think that working a till in a bakery is really his lifelong dream?

When I was young, I had a myriad of jobs. One was driving delivery/washing dishes in a pizza joint. When I was doing delivery, I had to take every single customer a free pop. And, if I didn't fill the plastic, 1 liter cup more than halfway with ice, the owner of the place would go on a tirade, scream at me, call me horrible things, and generally lose his shit. Pop in general is rather disgusting, but pop that contains > 50% ice is a new kind of disgusting.

It took me six months to work up the nerve to quit.

Thanks for the feedback, hluska. I hear you...I've been in the same jobs and had no power. I was really trying to use this example to point out how companies need to have a culture of actually solving problems rather than shrugging and saying "sorry". I do think it needs to happen at the company level, otherwise you're right...the dude at the coffee shop will do what is less likely to get him fired.

Tim Ferriss talked about the 80%/20% principle. I wonder if the bakery considered the author as one of the 80% who's not bringing in the majority of the revenue.

Although I think all customers should be valued and treated as well as can be, there's hopefully always going to be more customers than there are staff (otherwise, it's probably a bad sign) and I'm not sure if they can dedicate so much attention and going all out. It's definitely everyone's business problem - how can you serve all your customers with the best service using minimal staff.

As a customer I care, deeply, about a sincere apology.

Take the time to help your customers, even if it means circumventing your system. Walk the 3 feet to talk to the chef. Send someone a check if your system can’t do refunds. Give someone another game if it turns out your games only work on PC.

And when that doesn't pan out, a sincere apology can still go a very long way.

+300 :)

Great article, though misleading title. Some but not all customers will care if you're sincerely sorry, but probably all don't care how your system is limiting you. If we could solve all problems perfectly with a predefined system, we wouldn't need human customer service. We need people to recognize when the solution lies outside the usual routine.

I think a savvy, empowered employee would say, "No problem sir" and order themselves whatever side they wanted to eat in a bit. =)

Many of these systems are in place because they automate record keeping and accounting, would this transaction modification decrease the effectiveness of the system? How can employees be better tasked to bend business rules while still working within the systems provided?

Agreed - it might be the policy of the company for record keeping purposes to ensure the financials tally up at the end of the year.

Sure, it might...but your financials will also look bad if you slowly bleed customers through bad customer service. Again, I think this is an opportunity for organizational change - even if the employee can't solve my problem right then, he should bring up the inflexibility of his system with his employers and they should try to change it.

That said - and as many commenters have pointed out - the employee probably wasn't empowered to make or suggest any changes to the business. :\

True - I agree. But yeah, many cases we're faced with people who aren't empowered to make decisions and the people at the top sometimes probably don't know about these issues. All of them get squashed by middle management. So, maybe your bringing of attention the problem might get some eyes :)

Not only is the writer off base with a lot of readers, but he also kind of just sounds like a dick.

...Unless they're Canadian

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