Don’t blame the pandemic for your rudeness 

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Have you noticed that the typical dinner-table conversation these days includes a story about a disappointing customer-service interaction: Flights being cancelled or rescheduled with little to no notice.

•  Queuing forever and a day for anything in demand.
•  Experiencing escalating wait times for customer support, with the recorded voice on repeat: ‘We are experiencing unusually high volumes of calls at the moment’.
•  Dining experiences and morning coffees taking much longer than you’d like.
•  Dealing with the exhausted employee who’s lost that sparkle in their eye.
•  Seeing the customer in front of you losing their cool and creating a scene over a minor issue.

They’re all stories that are being told off the back of a pandemic… But are they signs of a customer-care storm, or is this the new normal?

In the business world, the view is that we are facing a customer-care perfect storm. According to a recent McKinsey article, businesses they surveyed are trying to do their best to priorities customer strategies and deal with talent attrition, serving more customers with fewer people, and dealing with increased expectations about service levels.

In the customer’s world, it appears to be a temporary issue, and we are reminded to be patient, understanding and kind to others – focusing largely on the way people treat each other. At what point do we cross over from ‘storming’ to ‘norming’? Will we wake up one day and realise that this is the new normal?

To get to the core of the issue, we need to rip the Band-Aid off and see what’s underneath. Perhaps there’s a more systemic issue related to our capabilities and development of skill sets, or with how people manage themselves in a complex world.

People often ask me what I believe is really going on with customer service in this country and whether we’ve gone backwards in our customer care. My most raw and unfiltered response is: let’s stop blaming the pandemic for rudeness and start looking at emotional and social intelligence in society!

To teach and learn to provide exceptional levels of service that will lead to more stories at the dinner table celebrating and praising customer-service heroes, businesses and leaders need to deeply review the skills their people have for dealing with specific contexts and situations.

The world will keep throwing curve balls and complexity at us, that’s for sure, and only those who can deal with the human stuff well will navigate through customer or staff storms with ease. We can’t afford to stumble at this juncture – we need to look at how to embed the skills needed.

Question

If you are reading this as part of an individual reflection: How well are you taking care of yourself, equipping yourself with the ability to cope and self-regulate when the going gets tough?

If you’re reading this as a business leader: How well are you creating organisational resilience for the future, and supporting your people to use this inflection point in customer care as an opportunity to build their self-management skills?

Practice

Next time you or someone in your team solve a customer-care problem, take some time afterwards to review it:

•  Unpack what you or they did.
•  Deconstruct what you or they did.
•  Look at what the impact or results were.
•  ​​​Did they or you come up with a solution?
•  How did both parties feel during the interaction?

Love being in service,