The new tanty pandemic is adding to our customer service gap

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A customer-service gap is the difference between what the customer expected in a service interaction and what was actually delivered. Right now, the gap in customer service is a global issue – a recent article in The Wall Street Journal validated that what we’re seeing here in Australia is something the rest of the world is experiencing too. 

I never thought I’d see the day that a restaurant owner would shut their doors for a day to give their staff a paid break from relentless rough treatment by customers. Nor did I think I’d see a day when businesses had to employ security to prevent staff from being abused… And yet this is the world we find ourselves in. I’m not blaming the service gap wholly on the poor behaviour of customers, but I can see that adults throwing tantrums and acting like children is creating a feeling of dread in many workers at airlines, restaurants and customer-contact centres. It naturally affects the way they feel when they come to work – and can even have them not wanting to come to work at all.

One of the reasons people choose to be in customer service is the sense of fulfilment and satisfaction they gain from serving, from helping another fellow human. This new tanty pandemic could well kill off the best customer service we have in this country! With customer-service talent increasingly scarce, my small role to play in elevating customer service is to help people tap into that sense of fulfilment, even on their hardest days.

So what does a hard day feel like for a service agent? In a recent workshop we ran with 35 leaders from a high-volume retail business, we got them to look at the contrast between their best days versus a hard day in customer service. The list they came up with to describe their hard days included terms and phrases like ‘brain fog’, ‘unmotivated’, ‘Don’t want to speak to anyone anymore’, ‘stressful’ and ‘exhausting’.

One of the ways to make the customer-service gap skinnier is to help service staff notice what meaning they attribute to the problems and opportunities they experience in customer service, and to leverage this for a greater good. We can give them skills to make hard days better – to feel like they’re handling tough situations well and turning things around – for themselves and for the customer.

In simple terms, we need to help service staff not only be skilled at customer service but also help them be able to deploy these skills in difficult contexts– especially on hard days.

We need highly emotionally and socially intelligent people to lead this country out of its tanty pandemic and inspire others in service roles to do the same.

What you know and what you can do in customer service depends on the context, however. There’s no point in teaching people skills in empathy, sense-making, deep listening, problem-solving, asking good questions and communicating better if they’re unable to deploy these skills at the moment they’re needed. In other words, training in customer-service skills is redundant if the skills cannot be applied during the hardest days on the job.

The customer-service gap will continue to be fat, or get fatter, unless alongside customer-service skills training, we develop people’s ability to use those skills when they’re needed most.

Question

What customer-service skills training are you doing? Is it working? Really?

Practice

In the past week, who in your team has dealt with a difficult situation or customer and done a great job at it? What was the method of achievement for them – what skills and intelligence did they use? Once you’ve reflected on this situation, it could be a great story to share with others as a way of inspiring them or stretching them to see things differently.

​​​​​​​​​​​Love being in service,