“Would You Do That to Your Mother — The ‘Make Mom Proud’ Standard for How to Treat Your Customers” by Jeanne Bliss (Portfolio/Penguin, $27).What would make any mom want to “wash your mouth out with soap?” In the business world, soapy-mouth syndrome occurs because companies put company time before customer time. How? Well-intended best practices […]
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“Would You Do That to Your Mother — The 'Make Mom Proud' Standard for How to Treat Your Customers” by Jeanne Bliss (Portfolio/Penguin, $27).
What would make any mom want to “wash your mouth out with soap?” In the business world, soapy-mouth syndrome occurs because companies put company time before customer time. How? Well-intended best practices focus on internal processes that boost profit at the expense of their effect on the customer.
Example: Most large companies have customer-service call centers where a customer must follow numerous prompts and wait to speak to a person. The longer it takes to reach “help” means two things to a “mom”: 1. There must be a lot of customers with issues. Ouch! 2. The call center is understaffed, and the rep will be thinking about how quickly to deal with a customer's issue and move to the next call because reps have “call quotas.”
While the example deals with frontline customer contact, Bliss advocates using a “Would I do that to my mother” approach at all levels of the organization. Why? Decisions affecting the customer experience encourage either loyalty or estrangement. Those decisions start with how the internal customers (i.e. employees) are treated. Don't expect them to treat external customers better than they're treated.
Treating employees like mom involves letting them “think on their feet and make the right call.” Sometimes they'll make mistakes; they'll also learn from them. One of the soapy-mouth mistakes Bliss cites: Hiding behind “Our policy is … ” regardless of the customer's issue. Upon hearing those dreaded words, the customer actually hears: “Your policy doesn't care about the customer.” I found that out when I went to the local market to return an item. Despite having the market's sticker, the customer-disservice person invoked “Our policy is you must have a receipt” and wouldn't refund my $6. I won't be shopping there again.
