I’m a push-backer.  That, to some, makes me a real pain-in-the-neck.  It’s partly because of the field of work I’m in.  After all, we CX practitioners are always alert to things brands are doing poorly because it’s in our nature to seek out those…er, we’ll call them opportunities.  That’s in the spirit of what I’ve written before about CX folks being both the best Customers to have and the worst.

But I also know of plenty of complacent types who are willing to put up with poor Customer experiences and just let things be miserable.  I’m often surprised, for example, when I travel overseas to see how certain other cultures around the world don’t seem to even mind bad service.  It’s as though Customers don’t feel the need to stand up for themselves.

So maybe it’s my nature as an American, and maybe it’s my learned curiosity when it comes to CX in general.  But at the end of the day, I’ll confront and challenge the circumstances if I think something is being poorly handled by a brand.  Maybe that makes me a Karen, but at the same time I think I generally handle myself properly (again, since I’m in the business myself).

While it’s surely the case that, just like anybody else, I have a bad day from time to time, I endeavor to be courteous and respectful when I interact especially with front-line folks.  (I’m a lot less forgiving when I have a chance to speak or interact with someone in a leadership position, and for much the same reason I’m about to explain.)  After all, it’s rarely their fault if they can’t help me or any of their other Customers.

And quite frankly, that’s the crux of it all:  If you’re not empowering and enabling your teams with what it takes to help me, you’re not only setting me up for a negative experience, you’re setting them up for abuse.

While the aforementioned passive folks who will tolerate poor experiences and poor service (albeit, they may simply quietly go away and not be Customers of yours anymore), there are plenty of folks who will take out their aggravations with your policies or your processes on the first person they come upon in your business…and that’s your front-line employees.  The people who really do deserve the ire of your Customers are safely padded away up in their offices, ironically, further developing stupid policies and systems that will even further alienate your Customers by making their lives more frustrating and irritating.  Easy as it is for the executives and other leadership to say how much your Customers mean to you, it’s much harder to implement your ways of doing business when you also have to contend with irate Customers, some of whom may not be the most gracious in the world.

You really should be ashamed of yourselves, those of you who allow this dynamic.

Not only are you doing a bad job in the eyes of your Customers (while, ironically, I imagine, saying all the right things about how important they are to you), you’re showing a tremendous disregard for your employees (of whom I’m sure you sing even higher praises and pat yourself on the back about how much you appreciate them*).  You have a funny way of showing that when you neither empower them nor equip them with the right tools necessary to deliver on your Brand Promise.  When you think about it, it’s actually kind of insulting to your employees for you to treat them that way.

Show a little decency, if nothing else, by making sure your front line team has the tools they need and the authority to use them.  Also take a look at your silly policies and ask yourself if you’d like to spend your whole day explaining their asininity to people you’ve never met!

 

*Oh, and yes… probably one of the things you’re so happy with yourself about is that you understand and empathize with your front-line team members and how taxing it is for them to have to deal with your sometimes-unreasonable Customers.  But we know what they’re being ‘unreasonable’ about, don’t we?