I wrote a long time ago about how Customers don’t want to hear excuses about why their experiences with your brand are bad, they just want you to fix those issues. Recently I returned to the topic and some brands’ tendency to want to recruit us into their sausage-making by offering some extraneous and unnecessary trip down memory lane about why it is that they have a terrible policy or procedure when it comes to poorly serving us, the Customer.
Both of these (and likely many others, if I were to do a comprehensive review of my previous writing) examples are different versions of brands making excuses rather than solving issues. In the immortal words of a close friend of mine, “Ain’t nobody got time to listen to your excuses…get on and fix it.”
I can’t remember what recent event I went through with a brand, but as I was listening to the agent explain to me why she couldn’t help me (rather than, you know…helping me), it occurred to me: I’d never get away with this; not in business, and definitely not in my personal life.
And think about it yourself: How would, say, your spouse respond to your having done something to tick him or her off, and your response upon being called out was an excuse instead of making it right. Would that fly? What are you expecting to hear? “Oh, I understand, you got caught up in writing another silly CX article for your blog and so forgot to get the trash out before the truck came up the alley. Well, now that I have that background, the awareness itself makes up for an overflowing bin for the next week while we wait for it to come around again.”
Of course not. What’s the plan to get rid of the trash that’s not been picked up this week due to your failure? And do you have a plan for keeping that from happening in the future?
As an aside, by the way, and in a similar vein, as a wise woman once said, “you can stuff your sorries in a sack, Mister” while you’re at it.
Years ago, CX guru Jeanne Bliss wrote a cute book entitled Would You Do That To Your Mother?, subtitled “The New Standard for How to Treat Your Customers”. It was a cleverly-written somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach to personalizing (and more importantly, humanizing) the way we interact with our Customers. The point being: If you’d be upset that someone at a store, for example, treated your own mother the way you’re treating your Customers, well, keep in mind, that Customer is possibly someone’s mother…and yours may be next!
Try “explaining” your “reasons” for doing something your spouse (or your friends and acquaintances, for that matter) hates that you do… Instead of just not doing it anymore (and better yet, fixing the mess created by doing it in the first place).
And what about your boss? What would that look like?
We can all imagine how in the “real world” people would react to us if, instead of getting things right (or, when they go wrong, at least make true amends and put practices in place to avoid future failures), we shrugged and offered platitudes instead.
Now imagine that all your friends, your spouse, and your boss are complaining about something you do. Make believe there’s some sort of mechanism you have in place to actually invite such feedback from the people in your life. And you used that as an opportunity to say, “Yea, about that… I realize how much that must tick you off, and your feedback is important to me. That said, there’s really nothing I can do for you about it.”
And there you have it…
