If you want to give good service, you can’t do without a system for settling disputes with customers. However detailed and logical your customer service rules are, you will have disputed or simply difficult situations, where the customer thinks they’re right and you’re not. Such customers often make it a matter of principle and won’t back down, even when only a small sum is at stake.
The first line, the staff who serve customers directly, works by strict rules. Let’s be honest: these are usually low-skilled workers who can’t be given much room to maneuver. Otherwise you risk abuse, and you’d have to appoint a supervisor to check every case. Which kinda defeats the purpose of letting the first line settle disputes.
Here’s what I usually see in Ukrainian service, and sometimes abroad. A vivid case: a passenger on a plane orders a beer, opens it and starts drinking. When the flight attendant comes with the card terminal, it turns out the terminal won’t accept the passenger’s card, and the passenger has no cash. A situation with no solution. Someone has to pay for an open bottle of booze. Either the passenger, who has no money (or says so), or the flight attendant. The airline hasn’t thought through rules for situations like this, so there’s no one to cover the loss. Since the sale didn’t happen and the beer is gone, it will be deducted from the flight attendant’s pay as a shortfall. Fifteen minutes of bickering along the lines of “you have to pay!” “No, piss off, I have a card, it’s your terminal that’s broken” predictably leads nowhere constructive, because within this situation there is no constructive solution. The flight attendant is in tears, the passenger is in a foul mood too, and some of the passengers watching it all think either the airline is crap or the passenger is a jerk. In short, a heap of negativity.
In Ukrainian service, fruitless bickering like this is the norm.
Sometimes it even seems the frontline staff have a secret instruction: argue that you’re right until you foam at the mouth, until the customer goes home to write an angry Facebook post. Make sure they leave humiliated!
Now for how to solve it. Clearly, a business owner who cares about service, hearing about this from the outside, would say “to hell with it, how much is that beer! Let the customer go home with a decent impression of us.” That is, if the owner counts LTV and the cost of acquiring a new customer, and weighs the risk of negativity on social networks and simply of bad word of mouth from this customer. If the risk exceeds the sum in dispute, there’s nothing to think about. Simple arithmetic. The technician or programmer, on the other hand, gets a rap on the knuckles for the buggy software or the broken hardware. But only if the owner, or a sensible manager not squeezed to the eyeballs by their KPIs, heard about the situation in time. Before getting tagged in a Facebook post. And ideally the situation shouldn’t arise at all, and there should be someone who can solve the customer’s problem properly, looking at it from a bird’s-eye view.
So we’ve established that staff on the ground somehow need an owner’s attitude. What then, do we turn into a cooperative? Heh, been there, no thanks.
Either we give frontline staff the right to solve problems up to XXX dollars on their own, as they see fit, or we work out rules for escalating the problem to sensible managers.
The first method, as I recall, is described by Tim Ferriss in his bible for young business apprentices, The 4-Hour Workweek. He gave his contractors the right, I think, to settle any situation up to $100 without him. It’s a good method, and I can recommend it if you carefully select and train your frontline staff and, most importantly, help them understand how much service matters to your company’s success. But you’ll still have situations the first line can’t solve: either they’re afraid, or they simply don’t understand how to do the right thing. Besides, in this case you risk the following picture. Flight attendants keep compensating passengers for a broken terminal instead of reporting the technical fault to the right people. The first line is overloaded and tired, earns little, and at home there are kids, a husband, a mom, a younger brother on drugs. It does what gets checked, and sometimes what’s needed. Reporting problems means stopping to realize that this is a problem that will inevitably repeat, and working out who can fix it or come up with a rule to avoid it in the future. Demanding that of the first line is hard and doesn’t work well. A partial fix: require them to report every use of the “hand of God”, that is, of the “problems up to $100” rule. But that too, like a condom, isn’t 100% reliable.
Escalating to the second line, middle managers, is in my view a good solution that for some reason is rarely used properly. That is, people do escalate, but the managers turn out to be unable to solve the problems. I can’t help with that, except:
The second line should want to improve processes and service, not just keep doing its job well.
One more addition, which helps avoid the “tag the boss on Facebook, he’ll sort it out” syndrome. Collect feedback from customers after each purchase and deal with the negative before it spills out in public. But again, you need sensible managers. A brush-off like “your opinion matters to us, but that’s how our software calculates it” won’t get you anywhere good.