Mutually Assured Dissatisfaction
Getting Beyond Broken Systems That Cause Employee Disengagement
It’s never a good sign when a customer service representative uses the word they to refer to her own company. It indicates the employee is disassociating herself from her employer, and it often means you’re about to receive poor service.
When I had to ship my malfunctioning laptop back to the manufacturer, so it could be repaired under warranty, it was frustrating enough to lose the use of a new computer. My laptop was expected to be returned within three days, but then I received an e-mail from the company telling me a part needed to make the repair was on backorder. Even worse, the repairs department didn’t know when the backordered part would arrive.
I called the customer service line and a representative named Sherry answered the phone. She was polite, friendly, and empathetic. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to give me an update on the status of my computer. She told me that my only option was to wait six days and call again.
“They won’t let me escalate it until it’s been six business days. I tried to escalate it sooner, once before, and they told me it was too early.”
Sherry didn’t offer any alternatives, so I suggested a couple of my own. I asked if they could take the needed part from another computer or perhaps just send me a new computer, since they couldn’t tell me when they’d be able to repair mine. The answer to both of my suggestions was, “No.” According to Sherry, she had tried those routes already; her response was, “They told me they aren’t able to do it.”
I was disappointed and frustrated, but I suspect Sherry was, too. After all, she didn’t manufacture my laptop improperly, she didn’t cause the parts shortage, she wasn’t responsible for the lack of information on the backordered part, and she clearly didn’t write the policy that makes customers wait six business days before escalating the inquiry to someone with greater authority and resources.
Many people get into customer service because they like to help others, but Sherry wasn’t being given the opportunity to provide that help. Instead, she was tasked with sharing bad news without being able to offer any solutions. I could tell from the tone in her voice that she’d probably taken a lot of calls such as mine.
This chapter explores the critical link between a company’s service delivery systems and its employees’ motivation. We’ll learn how employees can be put in an impossible position when those systems are broken. Eventually, employees may stop trying, and they may even begin to work against your company’s best interests. When customer service leaders don’t discover or rectify problems that are hindering employee performance, those problems can continue unchecked.
Broken Systems Lead to Disengaged Employees
John Goodman of TARP Worldwide estimates that as much as 60 percent of customer dissatisfaction is a result of poor products, services, or processes.1 Unfortunately for customer service employees, they’re usually the ones who bear the brunt of the customer’s anger. Rationally, this is part of their job. Emotionally, it’s difficult to repeatedly take the blame for something that’s completely out of your control.
Examples abound. Customers who call a 1-800 number and spend ten minutes navigating through endless menu options are probably going to be frustrated by the time they reach a live person. The cable company may do a poor job of managing work schedules, but it’s the repair technician who has to face the fuming customer when he arrives an hour later than expected. A customer waiting in unbelievably long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles is likely to be somewhat agitated by the time she reaches the employee behind the counter.
Customer service representatives are often part of a much larger system that serves a company’s customers. This system is made up of people from various departments, policies and procedures, and the leaders who design and manage them all. When these systems are broken, frontline employees may lack the resources or authority to resolve the issues that lead to poor service. In many cases, these employees are just as frustrated as their customers because they must repeatedly listen to complaints while being powerless to help.
Sherry, the customer service rep at the computer manufacturer, was caught in a broken system when she explained to me her company’s far-flung operations. The backordered part needed to fix my computer was being shipped from a supplier in Asia. The facility that would complete the repair once the part finally arrived was located in Memphis. Sherry worked at the company’s call center in Atlanta. As much as she wanted to help me, any action she suggested would have to be reviewed, approved, and executed by someone else in a different department and in a different city. Repairing and returning my computer was physically out of her control.
Situations like these are made worse when customers make no distinction between the employee and the company. A customer who says, “You screwed up my order” or “You can’t do anything right” may be referring to the company, but the language and tone feel like a personal attack to the employee. Employees soon find themselves in a no-win situation where they can’t fix the problem and yet they feel like they are receiving all the blame.
I saw this problem firsthand when I worked as a training supervisor for the call center of a clothing catalog company. One of the company’s broken systems was handling returned merchandise. The returns department was so chronically behind that packages sent back by customers would sit for up to four weeks in a truck trailer behind the warehouse before employees even opened the packages and recorded the returns in the customer database.
This created an information void that caused big problems for customer service reps. Reps had to rely on the database when customers called to inquire about the status of their return, but the reps couldn’t give an answer if the returned merchandise hadn’t been recorded in the database yet. Customers were understandably upset when told the company had no idea whether a return they’d mailed three weeks ago had arrived.
The company also had some unfriendly return policies that made customers even angrier. Customers returning an item they didn’t want couldn’t receive a refund until the return had been recorded. Customers who wanted to exchange an item would have to be charged for the new item if they didn’t want to wait the three to four weeks for their exchange to be processed. These inflexible policies made it even more difficult for customer service reps to provide a solution.
My department was asked to train the call center representatives to handle these situations as best they could, but implementing a few communication techniques was no substitute for fixing the real problem. I don’t know of any secret phrase that can make a customer feel better when your business is unable to find a package mailed three weeks earlier, and then it is unwilling to help the customer until after it has finally processed the return. Needless to say, our training was of little help.
Our customer service reps were incredibly frustrated by their inability to provide any real assistance to these customers. Eventually, either they learned to stop caring or they left the job. The employees who remained became less and less empathetic to their customers as they grew tired of repeatedly handling the same complaints. Many of the employees who didn’t quit were eventually fired for poor performance.
The vice president of customer service finally tried to address the problem by instituting a process improvement initiative called “One Call Resolution.” The goal: Resolve customer complaints on the very first call, so customers wouldn’t call us over and over about the same problem. But the entire initiative consisted of a banner hung in a conference room and a short meeting to explain the concept to our call center supervisors. Nothing was done to address the huge backlog of unprocessed returns and the inflexible policies, which remained unchanged.
In his landmark book Good to Great, bestselling author and researcher Jim Collins examined why some companies make the leap to greatness while others don’t. One of his findings was that great companies have leaders who are continually on the lookout for systemic problems.2 Conversely, companies that wallow in mediocrity or eventually fail often do so because of their inability or unwillingness to identify and confront these challenges.
Organizations that consistently identify and fix service delivery problems go way beyond hanging a banner or holding a pep rally. They monitor service levels, conduct a root-cause analysis to find the source of problems, and rapidly implement real solutions. Employees at all levels, from the frontlines to top executives, are focused on continually improving customer service.
Oregon’s Portland International Airport is an example of an organization that consistently roots out systematic issues that can impact customer service. The results have paid off. In 2010, Condé Nast Traveler rated it the best airport in the United States for the fourth time in five years.3
Donna Prigmore is the customer relations manager at Portland International Airport. She and other airport leaders ask a lot of questions and regularly engage in dialogue with employees and passengers in an effort to capture customer feedback and identify any potential problems. Donna speaks with employees who work for the airlines, restaurants, stores, and service providers operating at the airport. She talks to passengers directly and solicits their feedback via a customer service survey. She even checks in with the volunteers who work at the airport’s information booth to learn what questions are asked most often and what problems travelers encounter most frequently.
When a problem is identified, Donna and her team are able to bring the airport’s various departments, vendors, and contractors together to find a solution. For example, when some of the employees who help passengers find a taxi or hotel shuttle overheard several people complaining about all the restrooms in the baggage claim area being closed, they forwarded this feedback to Donna, who shared the information with the janitorial department supervisor. This supervisor adjusted the cleaning schedule accordingly, to prevent all the restrooms in one area from being closed at the same time. It was a small issue, but one that could have been difficult to resolve unless someone like Donna was able to connect all of the pieces.
Learned Helplessness Arises from Broken Systems
The longer systemic service failures are allowed to continue, the more likely employees are to become frustrated and dissatisfied with their jobs. Employees in this situation may soon find themselves thinking, “They don’t pay me enough to deal with this every day.”
Broken systems can eventually lead employees to experience a condition that psychologists call learned helplessness. It occurs when people believe they are powerless to stop something negative from happening—and so they begin to act as if it were a foregone conclusion.4 Employees suffering from learned helplessness stop trying to resolve problems or provide outstanding service because they believe there’s nothing they can do to make the customer happy.
Sherry, the computer manufacturer’s customer service rep, was experiencing learned helplessness. She explained all the reasons why she was unable to help me get my computer repaired and returned any quicker. Her attitude was that there was nothing that could be done but wait. Any suggestion I made was quickly countered with, “I’ve tried that before and it won’t work.”
Employees experiencing learned helplessness also tend to become focused on placing blame for their dissatisfaction rather than trying to resolve it. They blame management for not fixing the broken system or process. They blame other departments for not doing their jobs correctly. Some may even blame their customers for not being more understanding.
I once stepped into an airport newsstand to buy a magazine. While I was searching for one that looked interesting, I overheard the newsstand’s two employees trying to outdo each other with stories of poor customer behavior. Their stories all started with some version of “What I hate about customers is …” It became obvious that I would likely become more fodder for them, so I left the store without making a purchase.
You’d expect employees to leave their jobs if they disliked them so much, but people experiencing learned helplessness may not realize this is an option. I returned to the same airport newsstand three months later and encountered the same two employees having the same conversation about customers they hate. This time, I was determined to have something to read for my flight, so I quickly selected a magazine and took it to the register. The two employees looked at me disdainfully while one of them rang up my purchase. I waited patiently for her to tell me the total, but she instead pointed at the display on her register without saying a word. I paid the amount indicated and as I left the store I overheard the employees complaining about customers who are too dumb to see the amount displayed on the register.
When employees believe that customer dissatisfaction is a foregone conclusion, it becomes a self-reinforcing concept. Because these employees have stopped trying to fix problems they don’t think can be solved, customers continue to get irritated with both the problem and the employee. The customer’s unhappiness further reinforces the employee’s belief that dissatisfaction is inevitable.
The best way to help employees avoid experiencing learned helplessness is to make them feel like a valuable part of your organization’s efforts to continually improve customer service. Ask for their feedback. Involve them in process improvement initiatives. Give them the skills and authority to take greater control of the service they provide.
Employees will help you identify the source of service failures when they know their input is expected and their suggestions are listened to. People working at the Portland International Airport are continually on the lookout for opportunities to improve customer service because that’s part of the culture. They know their observations count and, most important, their suggestions will be taken seriously.
Involving employees in process improvement initiatives is another important step. I once worked with a client’s payroll department to help the staff members overcome learned helplessness by involving them in improving their processes. The department had been under scrutiny for extensive errors and frequently missing or delayed paychecks. Department employees had become so busy trying to keep up with their workload that they were convinced the only solution was to add additional employees. However, there was no room in the budget to bring on more staff, so the team began to accept the errors and delays as inevitable.
Our first step together was coming to an agreement on the role of the department. Payroll viewed its function as a data-processing center, where time cards went in and paychecks came out. This task-oriented approach made it difficult for the payroll staff to distinguish between essential and nonessential tasks or to appreciate how frustrating it was for employees not to receive paychecks or be paid less than they were owed. The payroll team needed to view employees as internal customers, so we redefined the team’s role to focus on ensuring all employees were paid accurately and on time.
The second step was to create a map of the current payroll process. They instinctively knew that some of their work was inefficient, but this map helped them visualize some glaring problems. They were able to identify many duplicate steps that could be eliminated. Reflecting on their vision of paying all employees accurately and on time also helped the team reprioritize work so that nonessential tasks were put aside during busy times. Finally, the team implemented several safeguards against errors so that fewer employees would receive incorrect paychecks and the payroll team would spend less time fixing mistakes.
The final step was to implement the new procedures and measure progress. The entire team was eager to try out the new process that it had created and felt much better about its ability to achieve great results. The team’s efforts and positive attitude resulted in a 25 percent reduction in payroll processing time, a sharp reduction in errors, and a savings of thousands of dollars. The department gradually began earning back the trust of internal customers. Best of all, the payroll team now realized it could control its own success and wasn’t dependent on adding additional employees to be successful.
Employees may not always be able to fix a broken system, but they still may have the ability to influence a better outcome for their customers. A call center representative may not be able to get returns processed any faster, but he may be allowed to send out a replacement order before the returned merchandise is received. An employee at an airport newsstand may not be able to control the long security lines that aggravate travelers, but she can try to brighten another person’s day with an infectious smile and fast, friendly service.
The Dangers of Employee Disengagement
Employee engagement is defined as the extent to which employees purposefully contribute to their organization’s success. According to the BlessingWhite 2011 Employee Engagement Report, fully 18 percent of U.S. employees are disengaged—meaning they’re dissatisfied with both their jobs and the companies they work for. The report says these employees “are the most disconnected from organizational priorities, often feel underutilized, and are clearly not getting what they need from work.”5
There are many reasons an employee may become disengaged. The employee may have been hired to do a job she doesn’t enjoy. The employee may have a poor relationship with his boss. One of the biggest contributors to employee disengagement is a failure to detect and fix processes that produce customer dissatisfaction.
Chronic customer service failure can trip several levers that contribute to employee disengagement. Employees may feel as though their contributions don’t count since they don’t have the ability to improve the broken process. They may feel their voice isn’t heard if their manager doesn’t listen to or act on feedback about chronically broken systems. They can easily be discouraged after repeatedly being on the receiving end of customer complaints they come to believe they aren’t able to resolve.
You can imagine how unlikely it is to get even passable customer service from someone who’s disengaged from his work and employer. This kind of employee simply doesn’t care about serving customers and gives the minimal amount of effort just to get by. Some of these employees intentionally deliver poor service as a means of lashing out at their employer and customers.
JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater suddenly became famous in August 2010 for committing what is easily described as an ultimate act of employee disengagement. The incident occurred aboard a JetBlue plane on the tarmac of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. After an apparent argument with a passenger, Slater reportedly got on the plane’s public address system and let loose a string of expletives. He then grabbed a beer from the plane’s galley, opened an exit door, and slid down an emergency slide.6
Ironically, Slater received an outpouring of support from other customer service employees who viewed themselves as equally fed up with their customers’ boorish behavior. They hailed Slater as a hero for doing what many had always imagined themselves doing. Meanwhile, JetBlue was faced with an embarrassing public relations incident, an employee facing criminal charges, and a costly repair job to fix the emergency slide on the airplane.
This may be an extreme example, but there are many other instances where disengaged employees deliberately provide poor service. A retail associate may avoid customers who are obviously in search of help. A restaurant server may keep customers waiting while she carries on a conversation with a coworker. A city worker may intentionally delay processing paperwork needed for a building permit.
Employee disengagement can also make it more costly for companies to deliver customer service. Gallup, another organization that measures employee engagement, estimates that disengaged employees in the United States alone cost companies $300 billion annually in lost productivity.7 When I worked as a training supervisor for the catalog company with the returns problems, chronic absenteeism and high turnover rates were two costs related to employee disengagement that directly affected the bottom line.
On any given day, nearly 20 percent of the company’s call center employees would call in sick. The company had to hire extra employees and pay expensive overtime to cover shifts for the absentees. Supervisors spent a lot of their time disciplining employees for absenteeism, which in turn created additional resentment.
The cost of excessive turnover was also substantial. The company’s annual turnover rate among call center employees was well over 100 percent. Most employees quit or were fired before they had been there even one full year, and many didn’t even make it ninety days. This created a continual need to hire and train new employees, which significantly elevated recruiting and training costs. Furthermore, the high turnover rate gave the company a reputation in the community as an undesirable place to work, so it soon became much harder to find talented—and engaged—employees.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are engaged employees, and according to BlessingWhite’s 2011 Employee Engagement Report, 33 percent of U.S. workers fall in this category. Engaged customer service employees understand and agree with their company’s goals, strategies, and attitudes toward customer service. These employees consistently try to align their performance with the needs of their employer.8
This research suggests employers need two essential elements to engage their customer service employees. First, customer service leaders must share their customer service goals with employees and provide feedback on progress toward those goals. Second, employees must be enlisted as partners in achieving these goals rather than being treated as pawns who move at management’s whim.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car is an organization that has leveraged employee engagement to earn a reputation for outstanding customer service. At the heart of its engagement efforts is the Enterprise Service Quality Index (ESQi), which is a system used to evaluate customer satisfaction. Enterprise customers are regularly surveyed on their rental experience, and the results are captured and reported at the local branch level.9
The ESQi results are regularly reported throughout the company. Employees are trained on the factors that drive customer satisfaction. They are encouraged to use their discretion to fix problems on the spot in an effort to avoid poor survey scores. A relentless desire to improve service has even spurred innovative ideas from frontline employees, such as Enterprise’s most famous service offering to pick you up at your home or office.10
By now, you may be wondering why more companies don’t fix the broken systems that hurt customer service and crush employee engagement.
This is precisely the area where leaders in many organizations fall short. Some leaders rely too much on reports and data, rather than listening to employees and customers. Others just assume that employees will perform better if they’re given more incentives or face stiffer sanctions. Like employees, some leaders simply don’t care.
Dave, an account manager for a company that sold uniforms, was a good example of what can happen to customer service employees when their managers are blind to the root causes of poor service. His job was to take orders, provide customer service, and find ways to increase sales with each of his customers.
Business hadn’t been very good for Dave and his coworkers. Sales were down, customer complaints were up, and many customers were taking their business to competitors. Like many of his coworkers, Dave began to exhibit signs of learned helplessness and disengagement. He spent a good part of his day commiserating with coworkers about slumping sales, taking extra-long breaks, and finding ways to avoid work altogether.
Dave’s manager knew he needed to turn things around. When he looked at the department’s sales reports to find the answer, it seemed to jump out almost immediately. The company’s phone call tracking software revealed that Dave and most of his coworkers were making far fewer phone calls than they had been just three months earlier, when the sales figures were much better. The manager knew that taking care of customers required frequent contact, so the solution seemed obvious. The account managers needed to make more calls!
The next Monday, the manager announced a special incentive program. Any account manager who made 125 phone calls by the end of the week would earn a $100 cash bonus.
The plan worked wonderfully. All the account managers made at least 125 calls and earned the $100 bonus. Dave, whose calls had gone down significantly in recent months, reached 125 calls by Thursday! The manager patted himself on the back as employee after employee complimented him on a great incentive program.
The only problem was that sales didn’t go up during that week. In fact, sales actually went down from the week before. Dave’s manager was convinced the incentive program was a great plan, so he couldn’t understand what had happened.
Dave knew why (and after reading the passage in Chapter 3 about the problem with financial incentives, you may have guessed why, too). Dave earned the $100 bonus, but not by calling customers. Instead, he called friends, family members, and even dialed his own number a few times to make sure the call tracking software recorded 125 phone calls.
Dave didn’t call many customers because he knew there was nothing to talk about. His customers had been upset for the past year about long lead times and quality issues. The last straw had come three months ago, when the company significantly raised its prices. Now Dave’s products were more expensive, took longer to ship, and had more errors per order than those sold by his competitors.
Dave began exhibiting signs of disengagement and learned helplessness as more and more customers defected and sales declined. He made fewer phone calls because he was tired of fielding complaints about high prices and poor quality. Dave had gone to his manager for help, but the manager didn’t seem to listen. In a typical disengagement pattern, Dave began spending most of his day complaining to coworkers while waiting for things to somehow get better.
The manager never questioned why a successful and experienced account manager like Dave suddenly stopped making calls. It never occurred to the manager that the increase in prices had taken away Dave’s last remaining competitive advantage. Now the company’s customers were leaving in droves to buy better-quality products that were delivered faster for less money.
Managers who remain blind to the big picture aren’t likely to solve the systemic problems that drive customers away. Too often, leaders fail to dig deeper when they encounter the symptoms of poor service. They try simple fixes—such as offering incentives, trying to script employees’ behaviors, or even threatening employees with disciplinary action or termination—which only create more problems. What these leaders don’t do often enough is carefully examine the real root cause of the problem before creating a solution.
Successful customer service leaders approach problems by first asking questions. They resist the urge to assign blame, jump to conclusions, or dismiss the problem altogether and instead try to understand what’s really going on. It doesn’t have to be a lengthy process; they are just careful to face reality before designing and implementing solutions.
One of my favorite exercises to use in this situation is to imagine an iceberg. Only the tip of an iceberg is visible above the surface of the water, but what lies unseen is often bigger and more dangerous. Uncovering icebergs usually involves asking just a few questions when confronted with a service problem:
• Is it possible this same problem has happened before?
• How likely is it that this problem will happen again?
• Can similar problems exist in other places?
• Who else might be affected by this problem?
• What can I learn from this problem that can be applied to other issues?
I remember conducting an iceberg investigation when I was customer service manager for a catalog company that was plagued by backorders on a popular product. My customer service reps were being besieged with calls from angry customers, and it was definitely taking a toll on their morale. It was tempting to write off the backorders as a simple matter of demand far exceeding supply, but this did little to help my employees provide better service.
The questions in the iceberg framework took me to many places within the company, from merchandising, to information technology, to our warehouse and order fulfillment operations. Working closely with managers from these departments we discovered a host of problems. These problems had far wider implications than a single product, but they also illuminated opportunities for improvement.
The whole process generated a list of solutions that may never have been discovered without looking for icebergs. We implemented a system where we proactively communicated updates to our customers on backordered products, using phone calls, e-mails, and postcards, which greatly reduced customer inquiries. Our information technology team discovered and repaired a computer glitch that miscalculated inventory levels and often made it appear that an item was in stock when it really wasn’t. The order fulfillment team improved its inventory tracking procedures and discovered large quantities of backordered products that had been previously lost in the warehouse.
Customer satisfaction is clearly linked to a company’s ability to deal with operational problems head-on. In Good to Great, Jim Collins aptly describes this as a willingness to “confront the brutal facts.”11 The process may be painful, but the long-term payoff is customer service delivery systems that work.
Solution Summary: Avoiding Mutually Assured Dissatisfaction
The best customer service organizations make it incredibly easy, instead of impossibly hard, for their employees to provide outstanding service. Here is a summary of the solutions presented in this chapter:
• Take action to identify and address operational issues that contribute to customer service failures and frustrate employees.
• Include employees in your organization’s efforts to continually improve customer service.
• Engage employees by sharing customer service goals, then enlisting employees’ help toward achieving them.
• Avoid becoming blind to reality by avidly searching for icebergs—the small signs that could be indicators of big problems.
• Approach operational problems by asking questions and gaining a true understanding of what’s going on before jumping to conclusions about the solution.
Notes
1. John Goodman, “Basic Facts on Customer Complaint Behavior and the Impact of Service on the Bottom Line,” Competitive Advantage 9, no 1 (June 1999), pp. 1–5.
2. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
3. “The 13th Annual Business Travel Awards,” Condé Nast Traveler, October 2010.
4. Guy Winch, The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships, and Enhance Self-Esteem (New York: Walker Publishing, 2011).
5. “Employee Engagement Report 2011, Beyond the Numbers: A Practical Approach for Individuals, Managers, and Executives” BlessingWhite white paper, January 2011; available at www.blessingwhite.com/EEE__report.asp.
6. Sean Gardiner, “Flight Attendant Pops Emergency Chute, Escapes Plane at JFK,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2010.
7. John H. Fleming, Curt Coffman, and James K. Harter, “Manage Your Human Sigma,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 2005), pp. 107–114.
8. “Employee Engagement Report 2011,” BlessingWhite white paper.
9. An overview of ESQi can be found on the Enterprise Rent-A-Car website; see http://aboutus.enterprise.com/customer_service.html.
10. Fred Reichheld, The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2011).
11. Jim Collins, Good to Great.