Getting Employees to Notice What Customers Really Need
My wife, Sally, and I flew into San Francisco for a getaway weekend and arrived at our hotel before check-in time. Hotels will often let you check in early if the room is ready, but the front desk agent informed us that our room wouldn’t be available for another forty-five minutes. We told her we’d relax in the lobby, and she assured us she’d let us know as soon as our room was ready. There were some overstuffed chairs directly in front of the check-in counter that looked comfortable, so we grabbed a seat and settled in for the wait.
I’m fascinated by observing people provide customer service, so I passed the time by watching the front desk agent and her coworkers. They seemed engaged in a never-ending flurry of activity. A steady stream of people approached the counter to check in or out, ask for directions, or make some other request. The phones rang frequently, and our front desk agent had to pause to answer. She also seemed to have quite a bit of computer work to do, since she filled the time between guests and phone calls by working away at the keyboard in front of her.
Sally and I started to get a little anxious as we neared the forty-five-minute mark, since it was a beautiful day and we were eager to go explore the city. We both started watching the front desk agent in anticipation that any minute now she’d wave us over and let us know our room was ready. She was such a whirlwind of activity that we assumed she was on top of it.
But forty-five minutes soon became an hour, with no sign from the hotel associate. We finally went back to the counter and asked for an update. She took a moment to look us up on her computer and said, “You can check in now, your room has been ready for half an hour.”
She had forgotten us! We were literally sitting in front of her for an hour, and she had forgotten we were there. Even worse, we could have checked in thirty minutes earlier. She didn’t even apologize.
Situations like this occur every day in customer service. From a customer’s perspective, it couldn’t be more obvious. The employee simply needs to pay more attention.
In this chapter, we’ll see that one of the challenges to providing outstanding customer service is that our attention is in increasingly short supply. In some cases, employees’ attention is divided among too many tasks, which can cause employees to miss opportunities to serve. At other times, employees can become so focused on one thing that they develop tunnel vision and again miss important cues from their customers. We’ll even discover a way that our brain naturally causes us to stop listening by jumping to conclusions. None of these obstacles are insurmountable, but companies need to provide customer service representatives with a lot of training and assistance to help them pay careful attention to their customers’ needs.
As I write this chapter, there are more than a thousand customer service jobs advertised on the website Monster.com listing “multitasking” in the job description. There’s even a posting for a medical billing specialist with “outstanding customer service abilities and sixth sense instincts.” I imagine “sixth sense” is intended figuratively, since companies wouldn’t seriously require job applicants to have some sort of ESP. However, companies would do well to look at multitasking in the same light as having a sixth sense.
Multitasking, the way most people define it, isn’t possible because the human brain is capable of handling only one conscious thought at a time. According to studies conducted by David Meyer, a researcher at the University of Michigan’s Brain Cognition and Action Laboratory, when we attempt to multitask, our brain is actually rapidly switching between the various tasks we’re trying to attend to. A little bit of time is lost whenever we move from one task to the next because our brain must refocus.1
The only situation where we can effectively perform more than one task at a time is when just one of those tasks requires conscious attention. That’s why we’re able to carry on a conversation with someone over the phone while we doodle on a notepad, but we aren’t very good at having that same conversation while trying to send someone else an e-mail.
To illustrate the challenges with multitasking, there’s a test known as the Stroop effect, named after an experiment conducted in 1935 by the American psychologist John Ridley Stroop. In the experiment, subjects were shown a series of squares and asked to identify the color of each one as quickly as possible. Subjects were then shown a list of words that were the names of a color. The words were all printed in colored ink, and subjects were asked to identify the color each word was printed in as quickly as possible. The catch was that the word and the color the word was printed in didn’t match, so the word red may have been printed in blue ink while orange may have been printed in green. On average, subjects took 74 percent longer to identify all the colors in this second list where the color of the ink didn’t match the word.2 (You can try a Stroop test yourself here: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/ready.html.)
In a service environment, our inability to multitask means employees must either choose between two conscious tasks or do both with far less efficiency. Think back to a time when you were served by someone who was speaking to another customer on the phone. One of two things probably happened. The first possibility was that the customer service rep asked you to wait or put the caller on hold so that she could serve one person at a time. The second possibility was that the rep tried to serve you while speaking to the other person, which resulted in her paying substantially less attention to you.
Our inability to effectively focus on two things at once isn’t the only challenge employees face when it comes to multitasking. Today’s modern work environment is full of auditory and visual stimuli that constantly vie for our attention. The way our brain interacts with these attention-catching stimuli naturally encourages people to switch rapidly between tasks.
Attention is captured in two primary ways. The first is known as “top-down” attention, where we consciously focus on a particular goal or task. The second is known as “bottom-up,” or stimulus-driven, attention, where an external stimulus grabs our attention, such as a phone ringing or a person suddenly standing in front of us.3
Our top-down attention can override our bottom-up attention, allowing us to tune out external distractions, but it requires deliberate concentration. However, the more our attention is captured by external bottom-up stimuli, the harder it is for our brain to consciously refocus its attention on a specific goal. The inevitable result of too many distractions is that we find it hard to concentrate and complete a single task that we might be able to quickly accomplish if there weren’t so many other things competing for our attention.4
Now let’s think back to the hotel’s front desk associate. She was bombarded by external stimuli. The phones were ringing, coworkers interrupted her, and guests continually approached her. The conflict between her top-down goal of completing certain responsibilities (e.g., letting us know when our room was ready) and the bottom-up attention grabbers (e.g., someone interrupting her to ask a question) caused her to constantly switch tasks. Each time this happened, my wife and I were pushed farther and farther away from her conscious mind until we eventually disappeared completely.
Many customer service employees are continuously interrupted by external stimuli that naturally encourage them to multitask. A server in a busy restaurant must keep tabs on multiple tables while being interrupted by guests. A retail cashier must try to ring up customer transactions while other customers interrupt to ask questions. Even someone working in an office environment is subjected to frequent interruptions by coworkers, new e-mail messages flashing onto the computer screen, and even that catchy song on the radio.
Some people argue that multitasking really refers to the ability to manage multiple priorities. By the dictionary definition, a priority is something that merits attention ahead of competing alternatives. This concept often invites confusion and poor performance when customer service priorities are not clearly identified and an employee is unable to consciously choose between tasks based upon their level of importance. When I take my car in for service, I typically spend a moment at the service counter with a customer service representative going over the repair bill. The phone will frequently ring while we are having our conversation, which brings us to a customer service dilemma.
The ringing phone is an external attention grabber that the customer service rep is certain to notice. The rep must now choose between continuing our conversation or interrupting it to answer the phone. She can’t do both, so one task must become more important than the other.
Her choice depends on her priorities. The rep will continue serving me if the priority is finishing up with the customer she’s already working with. However, she will interrupt our conversation and answer the phone if the priority is making sure all calls are answered within a certain number of rings.
What will happen if the priorities aren’t clearly defined? The rep will answer the phone. Without a specific intention to consciously focus on one task over another, the ringing phone will capture the employee’s attention and the natural inclination will be to answer it. After finishing the phone conversation or putting the caller on hold, the customer service representative will come back to me and say, “Now, where were we?”
With all the interruptions in the workplace, our natural inclination to focus on external stimuli, and a lack of clear priorities, it’s no wonder that customer service representatives find it difficult to be fully engaged with the task at hand. Their attention is constantly being pulled in any number of directions, which causes them to work less efficiently, make more errors, and ultimately provide their customers with poor treatment. Companies must help their employees do a better job of focusing their attention on customers if they want to deliver outstanding service.
The best way to help employees pay the right amount of attention to the right things at the right time is to make it easier for them to work within their natural abilities. This means creating a work environment where employees are able to focus on priorities and ignore distractions.
The first step employers should take is to discourage employees from performing more than one conscious task at a time. I once used this concept to help a client improve order-entry productivity and accuracy in their contact center. The company’s customer service representatives were responsible for retrieving orders faxed in by clients and entering them into the computer in between customer calls.
The data entry seemed like a great way to fill the time between each call, but it also led to some unintended consequences. The phone often rang while reps were halfway through entering an order, so they had to hurriedly save the order while switching their focus to the person on the phone. Some reps would try to cheat a little and complete the task they were working on while they answered the call, but this often caused them to give a poor greeting, or even miss the reason for the person’s call. The start-and-stop nature of the data entry clearly caused diminished productivity and high error rates.
You may have guessed by now that the simple solution was dividing responsibilities. A handful of reps were taken off the phones entirely so that they could focus attention on entering orders received via fax. Their productivity immediately soared and their error rates dropped because they could work at a constant pace without interruption. With fewer reps taking calls, the reps on the phones had less downtime to try to squeeze in additional tasks and were able to fully devote their attention to customers on the phone.
Another way companies can help employees pay attention to the right thing is through the use of automatic reminders, which are helpful auditory or visual alerts that capture someone’s attention at just the right time. The alarm on your calendar or cell phone reminds you to head to a meeting. Baristas at coffee shops use little timers to remind them to check on the brewing coffee. Call center representatives often have little windows that pop up on their computer screen to remind them to make a special offer or provide their customers with certain information.
Why automatic? Automatic reminders are simply more reliable than our own memories or even relying on other people. When we think back to the front desk associate who forgot to tell us that our room was ready, we can see it’s very possible she thought she would remember to check on us, without realizing just how soon she would be consumed with other work. Or she might have been relying on a phone call from someone in housekeeping to let her know the room was ready, but that system would fail if the housekeeper forgot to call. Relying on your frazzled memory or on other, equally harried people to remind you to do something is, unfortunately, a recipe for forgetfulness.
A third way for companies to help their employees is to firmly establish customer service priorities. If you recall, employees may have a difficult time paying attention to the right tasks when they face confusing or competing priorities. Clear priorities that are frequently communicated and consistently followed can help employees make the right choices in situations where there are competing tasks.
The Walt Disney Company sets clear priorities for its cast members (Disney’s term for employees) so that they will know what’s important in any given situation. I once saw it in action while riding the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, a thrill ride that simulates being stuck in a runaway elevator inside a haunted hotel. Everyone had just belted into his or her seat when a young boy started crying and protesting that he didn’t want to go on the scary ride. The cast member playing the “demented elevator operator” immediately broke out of his character and invited the boy to step off the ride. He assured the boy’s concerned mother that he would keep a close eye on her son while she enjoyed the ride. When we returned and the elevator doors opened, the cast member was waiting with the now-smiling boy standing next to him.
Disney’s priorities clearly guided the cast member’s actions. Safety is the first priority, as evidenced by his delaying the ride and making sure the boy safely exited. The second priority is courtesy, so the cast member momentarily paused his scripted routine to politely address the young boy and assure the mother that her son would be safe. The show is Disney’s third priority, so the cast member quickly resumed his act once the first two priorities were addressed.5
Paying TOO Much Attention Isn’t a Good Idea, Either
Customer service representatives are often guilty of not paying enough attention, but paying too much attention to a single customer or task can have consequences, too. Here’s an example.
I was dining at one of my favorite local restaurants with my wife and her parents. We received lousy service throughout our meal and hardly saw our server after she took our orders. Our water glasses sat empty and we finished our food before she came back to take our drink order. It even took a long time just to get our check.
Why was our service so poor? The most likely explanation was that our server was paying too much attention to a large group seated in the middle of her section. The members of this party arrived in a steady stream rather than all at once, so she was constantly going back to them to take a new drink or food order. Large groups can be difficult for servers to handle, and we could clearly see that she was focusing her attention on making sure these people were happy.
Paying so much attention to the large group caused her to develop tunnel vision, which made it difficult for her to see us or remember our needs. She repeatedly walked within eyesight of our table on her way to the kitchen without even glancing in our direction. We even resorted to waving at her in an attempt to capture her attention, but she seemed completely absorbed with taking care of this large party.
Our poor service may have been attributable to something called inattentional blindness. Think of it as the opposite of the front desk associate who was constantly distracted. It’s possible to be so focused on a specific task that you tune out external stimuli that would otherwise be very obvious.
An amazing experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons illustrates this effect. (You may want to try it yourself before reading further by watching this short video on YouTube at http://youtube/vJG698U2Mvo.)
In the experiment, subjects are asked to watch a short video that features two teams of three people. One team is wearing white T-shirts while the other team is dressed in black T-shirts. Both teams are passing basketballs back and forth among their teammates while mingling with members of the other team. The subjects in the experiment were asked to watch the video and count the number of times the team in white passes the basketball.
About halfway through the video, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks into view from the right side of the screen. The gorilla slowly walks through the two teams passing their basketballs, coming to a stop in the middle of the scene. It faces the camera and pounds its chest before turning to its right and slowly walking off screen.
Amazingly, Chabris and Simons discovered that nearly 50 percent of the test subjects failed to notice the person in the gorilla costume. The test subjects who missed the gorilla were so focused on counting the white team’s basketball passes that they tuned everything else out, including the gorilla!6
There are many situations where inattentional blindness, or “invisible gorillas,” may lead to poor customer service. A grocery store cashier discussing her break schedule with her supervisor may miss a chance to greet the customer standing in front of her. A retail associate consumed with folding a stack of sweaters may not notice a customer who clearly needs help finding a pair of jeans. A customer service representative may get so focused on clearing out a slew of e-mails that he hardly bothers to read each one before pasting in a stock reply and hitting Send.
The challenge of inattentional blindness can be compounded by a belief that an employee should have seen something so obvious. If Chabris and Simons hadn’t documented their experiment, who would believe that so many people wouldn’t notice a gorilla calmly strolling through a short video? Likewise, customer service supervisors often chalk up episodes of inattentional blindness to an employee’s carelessness. A restaurant manager might tell a server, “You need to pay more attention,” without understanding the real reason that she repeatedly ignored several of her tables while attending to the needs of a large group.
Inattentional blindness may be another reason my wife and I became invisible to the hotel’s front desk associate. There were several occasions when she wasn’t being interrupted by a phone call, another guest, or a coworker. During those times, she turned her attention to her computer and intently focused on her stack of paperwork. The concentration required to complete those computer tasks may have caused her to deliberately tune out any additional stimuli, such as two guests patiently waiting in the lobby right in front of her.
There are a couple of ways to help employees avoid inattentional blindness. The first is to reduce the amount of tasks employees are expected to accomplish in addition to serving customers. Tasks tend to take employees’ focus away from helping people because supervisors can easily observe whether a task is completed while customer interactions are usually harder to monitor.
Home Depot has used this strategy to dramatically improve its customer service levels. Since 2007, Home Depot’s customer service ratings have risen steadily after hitting rock bottom with a 67 percent satisfaction score on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.7 A core component of the company’s turnaround was reducing the number of tasks assigned to sales associates and putting more people on the floor, making it easier for customers to get assistance. This approach even extended to store management teams, where more than 200 weekly reports and e-mails were eliminated in favor of a simple one-page scorecard.8 Just three years later, Home Depot’s customer satisfaction rating had risen to 75 percent.
Another way to avoid inattentional blindness is to create the expectation that employees proactively greet any customer who comes near them. In hospitality industries, where employees have face-to-face customer contact, this technique is referred to as the 10 & 5 Rule: Associates are expected to give any guest within ten feet a nonverbal acknowledgment, such as a smile or a wave, and verbally greet any guest who is within five feet. In retail, it’s known as “zone coverage,” where associates are expected to greet any customer who comes into their department or assigned part of the store. Employees can avoid inattentional blindness by continually scanning for customers in need of assistance rather than waiting for customers to approach them.
Listening to Customers Can Be Difficult
So far in this chapter, we’ve examined obstacles that keep employees from focusing on their customers. When a customer does manage to capture an employee’s attention, it may still be difficult for the employee to truly listen. Our own brain can sometimes be the source of distractions that prevent us from understanding our customers’ needs.
Time pressure is one example. When people feel rushed or hurried, they may find their mind wandering in anticipation of the next task. Seeing a long line can cause a cashier to work a little faster and pay a little less attention to each individual customer in an effort to keep the line moving. Call centers often have large display boards that indicate the number of callers on hold, along with their average wait time, which can encourage reps to hurry through calls when those numbers get beyond acceptable limits. Even employees who handle e-mail correspondence can miss important pieces of their customers’ messages when they are working too fast to clear a backlog of inquiries.
Yet another obstacle is that, even when we’re consciously focused on a particular task, our brain can sometimes override our concentration by jumping to conclusions. I once experienced a classic example of this phenomenon when I called a customer service number to get some help with a password for accessing my online account. I was halfway through my question when the customer service representative interrupted me and said, “That’s actually a separate password than the one I’m resetting for you. That one is just for billing.”
Great, except that wasn’t the question I was about to ask. “I know,” I said, “but I was going to ask if I can reset the billing password myself so that I …”
He interrupted again: “But you don’t need the billing password to access your online account.” Sigh. Still not the question I was trying to ask.
Why do so many knowledgeable customer service representatives find it difficult to listen to their customers without interrupting? This problem is related to how we naturally process information.
The human brain has a unique design feature that allows us to take a small amount of information and compare it to familiar patterns. This capability allows us to make quick sense of large amounts of data without getting bogged down in the details. It’s an ability that comes in handy in many ways, such as determining if something is safe or dangerous, recognizing people we know, or even when reading.
Here’s a simple example. Try reading the sentence below:
People can easliy raed misspleled wrods as long as all the lettres are there and the fisrt and lsat letters are in the corerct position.
Thanks to our handy pattern-recognition ability, you can read sentences like this one and understand them. Your brain recognizes the pattern presented by the arrangement of the letters and the context of the sentence. It doesn’t matter that the letters aren’t perfectly placed; they’re close enough for your brain to quickly understand the meaning.9
It’s this same ability that can get customer service representatives into trouble when it comes to listening. The customer service representative I talked to about resetting my billing password had undoubtedly heard questions similar to mine many times. The start of my sentence fit a familiar pattern, so his brain stopped listening and presented an answer to the question he thought I was going to ask. The problem occurred because my question was a new variation on this familiar pattern, so the answer that leaped into his mind was incorrect.
Effective listening skills are often taken for granted; as a result, many employees are given little support or training in this area. Employees themselves can overestimate their own abilities because they often receive some of their customer’s message and mistakenly believe they heard all of their customer’s needs. Companies that want to deliver outstanding customer service must offer training and coaching to help their employees become better listeners.
Training customer service employees on active listening skills is a good place to start. Active listening requires us to be fully engaged with the person we are listening to. To be an active listener you should physically face the speaker, make eye contact, and provide nonverbal cues that indicate the other person has your attention, such as nodding. Employees should learn to ask clarifying questions and to paraphrase what their customer is saying to confirm understanding. Most important, employees must develop the ability to consciously suspend judgment until they are certain they understand what their customer is asking for. These skills allow customer service reps to focus on their customer, making it easier to tune out distractions and resist the urge to jump to conclusions.
Regular coaching and feedback will help customer service reps to keep their listening skills sharp. Constructive feedback can illuminate the blind spots that we can all develop, such as the habit of trying to finish the other person’s sentences. Supervisors should regularly observe customer interactions and help their employees identify opportunities for continual improvement.
Finally, reduce time pressure whenever possible by providing adequate staffing levels so that employees can work efficiently without being pressured to compromise service quality. Tight budgets can make it tempting for customer service leaders to cut back on staffing, but this decision may result in increased customer complaints and, ultimately, reduced revenue as dissatisfied customers take their business elsewhere. In Chapter 11, we’ll examine this issue in greater detail.
Solution Summary: Helping Employees Pay Better Attention
Customer service should be priority number one for customer service employees, but as we’ve learned, actions speak louder than words. Employees often need help to pay careful attention to each customer. Here is a summary of the solutions discussed in this chapter:
• Develop work processes and procedures that discourage employees from trying to complete more than one task at a time.
• Create automatic reminders that capture employees’ attention at the right moment such as a pop-up screen that reminds an employee to return a customer’s call.
• Establish and reinforce clear customer service priorities so that employees know where to focus their attention.
• Reduce the number of tasks that customer service employees are expected to complete, so they can devote more attention to serving customers.
• Help employees put customers first by maintaining an expectation that they proactively greet anyone who is in their vicinity.
• Train employees to use active listening skills when serving customers.
• Provide appropriate staffing levels so employees aren’t tempted to compromise service quality in an effort to serve more people.
Notes
1. David Meyer’s website offers a very good introductory explanation of multitasking, as well as several research papers; see www.umich.edu/~bcalab/multitasking.html.
2. J. Ridley Stroop, “Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 18 (1935), pp. 643–662.
3. Steven L. Franconeri, Justin A. Junge, and Daniel J. Simons, “Searching for Stimulus-Driven Shifts of Attention,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11, no. 5 (October 2004), pp. 876–881.
4. Valerio Santangelo, Marta Olivetti Belardinelli, Charles Spence, and Emiliano Macaluso, “Interactions Between Voluntary and Stimulus-Driven Spatial Attention Mechanisms Across Sensory Modalities,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21, no. 12 (December 2009), pp. 2384–2397.
5. Ted Topping, “Day Two: Disney’s Service Values,” DisneyDispatch.com, April 28, 2011.
6. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown Publishing, 2010).
7. The American Customer Satisfaction Index, Specialty Retail Stores, www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=18.
8. Patricia O’Connell, “Putting the Customer FIRST at Home Depot,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 5, 2010.
9. It’s a great service to the world when people like Matt Davis of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge take the time to summarize a heap of research in one coherent paper. You’ll also learn that my misspelled sentence is not 100 percent accurate. See http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/.