It’s how you say it
A few years ago, I ran into the following sign posted on the glass door of the steam room at my former gym (I’m no longer a member there, but I made a note of it at the time): “No Shoes. No Paddle Boards. No Gym Equipment. DO NOT pour water on the thermostat!!” Yes, capital letters and two exclamation points on that last one.
That got me thinking […]
Problem-solvers, or Taskmasters?
I recently pulled some Reserve duty (yes, after all these years, I still do that), and one of the things that always seems to strike me (yes, after all these years, it still strikes me) is what often comes off as a complete lack of CX focus among military folks whose job is literally “support” for troops. Now, that’s not everybody, and in fact, it’s not the case with my current duty station; there, the support folks are top-notch and very helpful. But I’ve been in a long time, and I’ve had very different experiences in different units over my years.
What I mean (at least, as I was reflecting on some previous units to which I’d been assigned), is the spirit in which some of these support organizations go about their job when it comes to keeping us all ‘in the green.’ By green, I mean that we have obligations to stay current in a lot of different areas: health, fitness, ancillary training, and the like. Readiness is the key to the realm in the military as we have to be ready-to-go at a moment’s notice. Maintaining that readiness entails periodic training, demonstrations of efficiency and health, and many other aspects of what makes us impactful in such an instance. So, there are entire offices within each organization (these Command Support Staff) who are responsible primarily for keeping not only records of each members’ currency but also to make sure we each get those tasks completed.
And therein lies the rub: Far too few members of some Command Support Staff teams (with fabulous and remarkable exceptions, to be sure!) see their job as much more than taskmasters…keep on top of everybody in the unit to ensure they’ve gotten their [ahem, stuff] done on time. […]
You don’t actually want feedback
Am I an old man yelling at clouds? Hear me out:
I was doing some cleaning the other day and had occasion to need a moist towelette. We keep some from a big brand you’ve heard of for cleaning tasks like the one I had at hand, and I opened a new package.
Now, they’re designed to come out of the pouch much like a tissue out of a box whereby the next one will ‘pop-up’ after you pull one out. Then there’s a lid that clips down on that opening to keep them all from drying out. Now, by virtue of them being damp (they are, after all, moist towelettes) and crammed so tightly into the packaging, any time I tried to pull one out, it would tear so that all I ended up with was handful after handful of useless shreds of wet clumps. I finally gave up and cut the package open at one end with scissors and put what was left of the stack into a Ziplock bag, sealed it and put it back under the counter when I was finished.
Anyway.
All that to say that, I had some feedback for this brand. […]
Are you setting your employees up for failure?
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. […]
It’s not just counting
So yes, I’ve been hounding you lately about VoC and Customer insights.
And yes, I’m an analyst going way back, so I love me some good old-fashioned bean-counting!
But wait.
If you’re taking my advice and looking in clever places for your Customer insights, you’ve probably taken my admonition that, in addition to asking your Customers where their issues are, you can check your own systems to passively get an idea where you can improve simply by checking the internal ticketing system within your Customer Service, Care, and Support teams. After all, while it’s helpful to hear directly from your Customers what’s going wrong, not only don’t you have to even bother them (further?) by asking them, but you can get out ahead of problems by noting—in the real world—where people are running into issues even before they call.
But regardless of where and how you find these insights, that analysis shouldn’t be overlooked.
And I don’t mean simply to crunch your numbers (and crunch them harder!). I mean that how you analyze can make a big difference as well. […]
Try that with your spouse
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.” […]
