“All I can do is think about quitting” (and other reasons it’s hard to deliver exceptional customer service)
Today I sat in on a cable installation. The technician arrived early, he was polite, and competent. The job was reviewed and when the customer (wrongly) assumed this tech would accompany her down the road a few blocks to another property she scheduled, his eye rolls were evident and her confusion flustered him another degree.
“So you can’t help me at my other property?”
He shook his head, No.
This installation was at a rental of hers, a duplex already receiving service that needed the other unit activated. The property down the street was her home. “I made the appointment with the same customer service rep on the phone during the call and explained to her that I just live down the street so they could be back to back. How am I supposed to be in two places at once!”
The tech politely apologized for the confusion and assured her that his install would be completed within 20 minutes or so. He went to look for a piece of equipment in his van. He returned and I stayed behind while he validated service and completed some electronic paperwork. His itch and frustration messed with his hands. His vehicle told me he was a contractor and I imagined he was asking himself a similar question to that of his customer: Why wasn’t I scheduled down the street? This would be another job, more money, and an established relationship with the customer.
“That seems pretty inefficient for them to send another technician,” I mused aloud.
“Yeah and I drove 2 1/2 hours for this job. I have to wait around until 8 pm — 8 hours — for my next install I won’t get home until around midnight. And then I start again tomorrow morning at 7. I don’t even know what my day looks like tomorrow.”
“2 1/2 hours!?”
“Nope. All I can do is think about quitting.”
Can you blame him? We had a few more exchanges and he compared how he — a contractor — is treated compared to direct employees of the huge telecommunications company. “They don’t give a shit about us.”
Within 5 minutes of his job being done, with a gaggle of equipment strung together on the floor, we arrived a few blocks away to find another technician waiting in the driveway. Again, he was timely (though we wasted some of his due to the scheduling overlap), polite, and competent. As I watched him and the customer interact, I held some preconceived notions based on the disparities our previous tech had alluded to. I expected him to be less helpful, assuming he always got preferential treatment.
But before long, he was apologizing on behalf of the previous technician’s visit (not the guy from the duplex earlier that day, but the tech that performed the install on the customer’s home). He apologized for interrupted service and the continually fragmented experience. When it came time for him to inform her that her equipment was out of date, his reserves were almost gone. He continued to troubleshoot and based on my very limited knowledge of cable installations, probably went beyond the mandates of his job order. But he looked at his watch and mentioned he was far from home, not used to working in this territory.
Within a few hours, the customer was back on the phone with the cable provider: the service on the other side of the duplex had been disconnected during the first tech’s install of the morning. The rep on the phone explained that was the order, to transfer service to the other side. The customer was defeated and explained that she never said that, that this was supposed to be a new activation. The customer wanted to speak with the woman who scheduled the day’s installs but, as you may have guessed, that wouldn’t be possible. The call ended with another inconveniently pending appointment and a highly unsatisfied customer.
Feeling un-cared for, even in a transaction as mundane as cable installations, goes a long way towards eroding meaning:
- For the technicians who drive long hours to do a single job, while we all know there is technology available to optimize this sort of thing
- For the customer service representative who has to redo and reschedule disgruntled techs and calm pissed customers, while she knows full well this mistake could have been avoided
- For the customer who feels angry and, in many ways, coerced to continue to pay for a service that is never what is promised, while she knows full well there isn’t another provider to do the job better
It cannot be lost on us that this customer is also someone else’s employee, working to get a job done. And in turn these employees are the internal customers of the organizations, literally the fuel that allows the system to churn.
Today’s vignette epitomized why people feel unfulfilled in their work: an unpleasant energy suck (is there any other kind?). It’s easy to see why all someone can do is to think about quitting. We can re-imagine this type of work and communication flow between parties, to deliver some continuity and meaning:
- Handing people back their agency
- Showing them their time is valuable
- Implementing systems to maximize their earning potential versus leaving them to fodder until a seemingly arbitrary light turns from red to green in a system we can’t see
I will assume that humans are well-intentioned and wanting to perform to the best of their abilities, to earn a living and derive a sense of dignity for a day’s work well done. But when all you can do is think about quitting, it’s hard to for any of that to come through. Even when you are paying for it.
