TL;DR:
- customer service is a process, not a philosophy
- processes evolve to meet business needs
- you are not the only thing in your customer's day or life, but you should still act to make your customer's day or life easier
- customer satisfaction is tangible and measurable
So like any modern starving artist, I have a few irons in the fire at any one time. I work on Adélie Linux, I operate my own business providing technical consulting and end-user support, I maintain a Linux kernel fork, and I do photography which has yet to pay me anything.
I'm also employed by a firm based in Sydney which provides disability support to people who may be socially isolated by their disabilities, especially people with autism spectrum disorders and similar pervasive developmental disorders. This support is provided through mediated gaming environments. If you figure out who they are, please don't try to get me fired.
As part of mandatory ongoing professional development ... actually, let me digress here. The disability support situation in Australia (as of the time of writing) is poorly regulated, and in many cases no specific qualifications are required to work in-field save for background checks to determine that one has had no "disclosable court outcomes" (read: convictions) and that one is not involved with or likely to be involved with those who would take advantage of society's vulnerable. My employer is not required by any statute to provide training, nor to require it of me. They chose to make their lives more complex to try to offer a better and more fitting service.
Anyhow, as part of my mandatory ongoing professional development in this space, I was required to undertake a two-hour training on Microsoft 365 - I've already done three units on Office at TAFE in the last two years, so one more wasn't going to hurt - as well as courses on Customer Service, Conflict Resolution, and Emotional Intelligence.
I'd like to talk about Customer Service, as a result. For fifteen years or so, I've been dealing with the general public in a customer-facing role of one variety or another. From May 2013 to December 2019, I worked near-exclusively nights and weekends at a bookshop which frequently saw some colourful characters. I've worked in I.T. for longer than many of my clients have been alive, and that, too, teaches some interesting lessons in customer service.
We're taught by the Australian firm The Art of Service which, to their credit, do seem to have their heads screwed on somewhat-straight, that service is not a process or an action but a philosophy.
I have to rebut this, drawing on experience from fifteen years of serving the customer.
A philosophy is something that can be completed. A philosophy can be baked and set in stone. A process is something that must evolve to serve the needs of the business, and in business terms is a repeatable, standardised method to accomplish routine activities. A philosophy is a guiding principle at best, and an outdated foundational document at worst.
Engineering disciplines are all about processes. Processes are auditable, challengeable, and are required to directly correlate to tangible outcomes. While customer service deals with many intangibles, largely because of the subjective nature of customer satisfaction, at the end of the day, customer satisfaction is tangible and measurable.
A satisfied customer will tell their friends that you helped them. They will tell their friends that you acted with integrity and that you met their needs. They will tell their facebook community groups that you can be trusted. Sometimes, they will fill out surveys saying that they felt listened to and understood. They write reviews on Google Maps or on Yelp!. A satisfied customer can be directly observed and even their subjective reporting of their feelings towards your business can be informative.
Here is where my training vendor and I differ. They believe that the internal attitude that you take to customer service is the primary driver of how the customer feels after an interaction. I hate to say it, but when your customer's in the middle of a divorce, they don't actually care if you smile while you serve them their coffee. If their cat just died, it's going to take a lot more than a smile and a friendly tone of voice for your business to be anything other than just another annoyance in their day. And if they had just won the lottery, your very visible hangover will be looked on with much more grace and sympathy than if they hadn't.
I'm expecting to find many faults with mandatory training, because basically all of it is your standard corporate professional development, and very little of it accounts directly for the business cases with which I work.
But right now, I'd just like to say that customer service is important. As a customer-facing employee, or the operator of your business, you are the customer's direct link to their beliefs around your company's values and competencies.
Customer service is so important, in fact, that one-size-fits-all training will never be able to teach everything you need to know. Personally, I'd love for every politician, legislator, investment banker, judicial officer, and Fortune 500 C-suite person to be required to work three months a year in a retail setting, and to be required during that period to live only off their income from that position. It would possibly help heal the disconnect between the lived experience of us starving artists and our elected representatives. And maybe, if they're taught the processes that businesses use to stay afloat while providing appropriate customer service at the lowest levels, they'd be able to take those processes into public life.
And maybe looking at customer service as a process - a repeatable and standardised method to achieve outcomes - and a method that changes in response to new information - isn't actually the crime that consultants might suggest.
Anyhow, right now, I'm going back to my process of getting all the items in place for Minecraft to run on Adélie (whoops, did I say that aloud?), and my process of analysing the legality of contracts, and my process of ongoing professional development, and I'll see you all when I get back to blathering here.