Ask the Wizard

Our kids had spring break a couple months ago, and owing to some tremendous misfortune that befell my wife last year on a trip to visit family, we were the beneficiaries of four free round trip tickets anywhere in the US. Since the flights were free, we decided to splurge on the hotel and ended up staying at one of the more upscale hotel brands. Interestingly, when we left Chicago, our departing flight was 40 minutes late, and when we got to the hotel that evening, our room wasn't ready, and also ended up being about 45 minutes before we could get into the room (which was fine since the weather was fantastic and we were happy to be outside). The difference in customer service between the airline and the hotel is instructive for thinking about customer service as a startup, whether you're enterprise or consumer focused.

The airline's website and official customer service language are all about lines like 'the customer comes first', 'you are [airline name]'s most valuable asset', etc. The hotel's website and official customer service language are non-existent. I couldn't find anything on the site that explicitly mentioned customer service. Of course, the actual customer service experience was first-rate at the hotel and miserable with the airline. You cannot provide or foster phenomenal customer service by saying you have it. You can only provide and foster customer service by embedding the customer in your company. There are two ways to embed the customer in your company:

1. The company only has one constituency, customers. How many times have we heard executives make statements about 'stakeholders' and 'several kinds of customers, including our shareholders, industry partners, blah blah blah'. Companies that think they answer to multiple entities answer to customers last. I think this is probably a contentious point, but you can't have a customer-centric business that feels it serves multiple masters. Companies that serve only the customer provide what the other stakeholders want as an artifact of their focus on the customer. Companies that serve multiple constituencies have "good reasons" why they just can't provide their customers with [insert something the customer values].

2. More information is always always always better than less information, aka Transparency. Businesses that provide outstanding customer-service have employees that all know it's ok to provide the customer with more information. Airlines, for some reason, are absolutely horrible at this. You can be sitting in a gate area for a delayed flight with an unknown departure time and get absolutely no information. I've actually heard gate agents come over the PA system and say "the answer is that there are no answers". Inexcusable behavior that's engendered by employees who are afraid of what might happen to them if they say something. EVEN when the information you provide is of no additional benefit to the customer, letting them know what you know is helpful, comforting, and builds a relationship with the customer. Going back to our airline/hotel example - delayed flight with no information until it was suddenly ready to board resulted in high stress, lots of passenger tension in the boarding area, lots of frustration with the airline. We got to the hotel, the room's not ready. The registration person says "look, the lock on your door is apparently broken, because the key only works 'sometimes'....i don't really know what means since i've never heard of it happening before, but the security team says they think it will be about thirty minutes to an hour. if you could come back here then, we'll either have your room ready or i'll have more information". In both situations, the employee couldn't really do anything for us. In the latter situation, I at least now have a sense of what's going on and that they realize it's a problem, and that they're working on something specific. In the airline case, there is no transparency, leading to anger, frustration and mistrust between the employees of the airline and the customers.

When you're building a business that you feel needs to be customer-centric, the path to success lies not in hanging signs on walls or writing mantras and slogans. It's reinforcing to your team that a) there is only one 'constituency', the customer, and that transparency is a company value.

Is it possible to build a successful business without great customer service? Yes. Absolutely. There are untold numbers of profitable businesses that resent and mistreat their customers and many of these are high on the list of having "the customer comes first!" billboards in their stores, websites, and literature. It's up to you to decide if your company is going to make customer service a competitive advantage. If you do, it has to be embedded in the company from the start, it can't be managed into the company later with messaging and mission statements.