CHAPTER 8

Articulating a New Approach to Customer Service

Tending to Your Garden (and Pulling Those Weeds!)

In 2004, real estate mogul Donald Trump tried to trademark the phrase “You’re fired!” His request was made in the light of his hit reality television series, The Apprentice. Thinking back to the first C of an Evergreen organization—character—Trump is a prime example of someone who’s become a character larger than himself. He has taken the persona of The Donald to such extremes that one could argue he’s even become a caricature of himself—a classic example of the concept of “the Facebook You,” as discussed in Chapter 3.

Trump has been mocked and laughed at. He’s hosted Saturday Night Live twice and has been impersonated by the cast more than twenty-four times since 2004. Trump has filed for bankruptcy at least four times,¹ and he has engaged in widely publicized feuds with other celebrities, including a long-standing media battle with Rosie O’Donnell. He has promoted himself in the world of professional (aka fake) wrestling, including a match called the “Battle of Billionaires” at WrestleMania 23, where the loser agreed to shave his head. No matter what happens, Trump is relentless in his shameless self-promotion. Trump’s request to trademark “You’re fired!” was denied, by the way.

So what does this story have to do with Evergreen marketing, you might ask? Well, it’s one thing to fire an employee, but can you fire a customer? And why in the world would you want to—especially after you’ve worked so hard to get that customer in the first place? I’ll tell you why: The reality is that the customer is not always right.

That may come as a surprise to you—especially since another message has flooded the airwaves in recent years. No doubt you’ve heard a tremendous amount about Zappos, the mega online shoe retailer whose story I relayed in Chapter 3. But there’s more to the tale. Zappos, the brainchild of CEO Tony Hsieh, took the idea of “wow customer service” to an entirely new level. Essentially, Zappos said to its employees something along the lines of: “Let’s do whatever it takes to make keeping customers fun.” And that they did! Dozens of stories about Zappos have been featured in the media: From ten-hour customer service calls, to customer service reps ordering pizzas for customers, to Zappos taking back hundreds of pairs of shoes from a family whose mother had passed away. The last time I checked, there were forty-four books on Amazon with “Zappos” in the title, and more than 5,000 additional customer service–related books that either referenced Zappos or were almost exclusively devoted to analyzing the success of the company.

With nearly every other marketing and customer service expert jumping on the let’s-write-a-book-about-Zappos-as-a-model-of-customer-service bandwagon, the dialogue has become highly skewed. In truth, the Zappos way isn’t the only way—and there’s a good chance it’s not your way. In fact, even Hsieh himself was willing to divulge a dirty little secret about business in his book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose: Not every customer is worth keeping. Hsieh wrote: “Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.”²

In this chapter I’ll breach topics most organizations are afraid to discuss, such as which customers you should fire. The simple fact is that often organizations spend time, money, and resources keeping customers and meeting unreasonable demands from customers who should be cut loose. Just like we have to prune limbs from trees to keep them healthy and let them grow stronger, companies often need to cut customers for similar reasons. I’ll present methods for you (or your team, if you have one) to use when dealing with the demands of an irate customer; a model for determining the validity of complaints, criticisms, and feedback; and how to know which customers aren’t worth keeping. This is a far more tactical chapter than those that preceded it, getting into the nitty-gritty details about customer service and other customer-related issues.

Let’s press onward.

GIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION TO FIRE BAD CUSTOMERS

In Chapter 1, I observed at the outset that it is a profoundly revolutionary time to be operating a business. Our customers are more knowledgeable than ever before. They have the upper hand in their ability to exert, expect, and demand the way they’ll do business and with whom. To survive, organizations must think about customers and their experiences in an entirely new way. Then I asked, “So what’s next?”

There’s a problem with my question, though. Did you catch it? I made the same critical error that almost everyone else is making. But I caught myself. We all know customers have changed. This isn’t exactly breaking news. We all know we are living in a newly connected world where our customers are talking to people they don’t know, and to each other. We all know that customers can jump on social media the first time our companies make a mistake. We all know some customers believe that they’ve hit us good with negative reviews on Yelp, or brash phone calls to our customer service teams because we might have shipped the wrong product or taken a little too long to deliver it.

The mistake I made, though, back in Chapter 1, is that not only did I ask the wrong question, but I also answered it. Do you remember how I answered the “What’s next” question? I said that we all need to become even more customer-centric. I could have left things at that—but that would make me no different than the 5,000 experts who decided to feature Zappos in their books.

Now is the time to be more nuanced in articulating what I mean by being customer-centric. I believe we need to be clear on who our best customers are, but we also need to be clear on the type of customer we don’t want. Furthermore, we need to have the courage to fire those customers. Here’s why: Remember again how, in Chapter 1, we discussed the true value of our customers? I made reference to the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. In brief, almost 80 percent of all results tend to come from 20 percent of the action. In other words, your data teams can show you who the top 20 percent of your customers are. These customers are likely responsible for 80 percent of your profits. These are the customers you want to dedicate time, energy, and resources to when it comes to customer service.

But view your company’s statistics from another angle and you’ll find that the Pareto principle still holds up. Your data teams should be able to identify the 20 percent of your customers who are creating 80 percent of your problems. Now these are the customers you want to fire—and it’s okay to do so. In fact, it is not only okay, but you owe it to your good and loyal customers to do precisely that!

Now that you’ve given yourself permission to fire your bad customers, it is time to name names. Let’s start culling the herd.

DETERMINING WHICH CUSTOMERS YOU SHOULD (AND SHOULDN’T) FIRE

When it comes to firing customers, I have a few simple rules of my own. Customers who are rude, racist, sexist, or vulgar should be free to pack their bags immediately. Give this customer the pink slip. Don’t worry about profitability in these situations; worry about employee morale. That being said, if the customer service dynamic gets heated and any of our employees lose their cool, we must also take a stand against rude, racist, sexist, or vulgar comments made to our customers. This is, after all, a two-way street.

When it comes to customer service, people can get downright nasty. Historically, the telephone has allowed people to show their nasty side, since they do not have to look anyone in the eye. The Internet, however, takes this dynamic to a whole new level. There has been a dramatic rise in keyboard cowboys and Internet trolls in recent years. These are the folks who come out with guns ablaze when things go awry. We’ve all been on sites with reviews of products and services, and sometimes it’s hard to believe the things people will write. Let them go. These customers aren’t worth your time or even your response. I believe this wholeheartedly, even if the mistake was originally yours.

Now that we’ve reviewed the undesirable customers who will inevitably surface, let’s review the other customers who you need to do a bit of research to identify. You’ll face two types of bad customers on the chopping block: problem children and Hungry Hippos. It may sound unpleasant, but allow me to introduce you to each in turn.

Your Problem Children

The problem child is the customer who is insatiable and never content—regardless of how well you do. This person is, quite simply, never happy, for whatever reason. Some people are just like this. We all know problem children. They’re constantly whining that people are taking advantage of them. Either that, or they’re complaining about one thing or another. In essence, they either can’t be pleased or they make it almost impossible for us to feel as if they are pleased.

In most businesses these customers are the easiest to identify. They are typically the lowest-value, most price-sensitive customers you have. There’s very little chance these customers will ever exhibit the qualities of genuinely loyal customers. They’re not going to be enamored with the emotionally engaging experience you are creating for your customers. In fact, quite the contrary: Problem children often grow up and become Hungry Hippos.

Your Hungry Hippos

In the classic Hasbro board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, players whack a lever that causes their hippo to “eat” a marble. The player whose hippo eats the most marbles wins. Every business is full of Hungry Hippos, and we are partially to blame. After all, we keep feeding them marbles. It’s surprising to many of us to learn that even profitable customers aren’t always worth keeping—not if they’re Hungry Hippos. While these customers may be considered “loyal” from a repeat visit/purchase standpoint, they are also intent on sucking you dry to ensure they get their money’s worth.

Some customers cost considerably more to serve than others, even customers who spend more. You see, even though some people may be “great spenders,” this doesn’t necessarily make them “high value” customers, especially if we don’t have a clear picture of what those customers actually cost. Some customers make excessive service requests, or abuse product consumption and usage limits. This means that, when it comes to growing your organization, it’s sometimes more beneficial to focus on your less profitable customers.

Consider the following examples: the retail customer who buys an outfit, wears it, and then returns it (it happens!); the e-book purchaser who reads the book within a day or two and then requests a refund; the restaurant patron who takes “unlimited refills or endless pasta” to an almost obscene level. Each and every day, organizations pander to the Hungry Hippos. The problem is that Hungry Hippos attempt to take advantage of what you do—and you serve them at a great expense to your organization. Let’s look at another example of Hungry Hippos and how they often attempt to “overeat” their share, even with larger organizations.

In a famous example, in 2007 Sprint canceled the accounts of more than 1,000 customers. At first, this decision seemed like a travesty. How could a company do such a thing? How could a company fire paying customers just for calling customer support? We learned later on that these customers were actually Hungry Hippos. They were calling Sprint repeatedly, claiming that they were receiving bad service and scamming the company for credits or discounts off their bills. Sprint argued that these customers were literally defrauding the company.³ And they probably were.

Hungry Hippos will continue to take advantage of loopholes and find any opportunity to take more and give less. It’s no secret that some people act this way. Some iPhone apps provide direct phone numbers and word-for-word scripts that people can use to call their cable, cell phone, and utility companies and negotiate deals on their contracts. Of course, there is “wiggle room” in many of these contracts. Most of us have experienced this inadvertently when we have canceled a service, such as cable, only to be called by the company later and offered a significant discount to return. In this case, you may have found yourself thinking, If I can pay $29.95 a month now, why was I paying $89.95 for the past seven years? Alas, the wiggle room itself is beyond the scope of our present discussion. The point here is that some people go out of their way to take advantage of company policies.

Amazon, a company that I described earlier as one of the most customer-centric businesses on the planet, is also using data to fire its Hungry Hippos. One user on the message board Blu-ray.com shared the following experience and an e-mail received from Amazon,⁴ stating that the customer’s account was closed due to excessive negative complaints and returns:

The user in question claimed this wasn’t the case, just as Sprint’s customers claimed they weren’t defrauding the company. Of course, we’ll never know the full stories. Nor do we need to. The simple fact is that sometimes it makes good business sense to fire a customer. If you are a business owner, I want you to realize that there is a lot of talk about how customers now have control, but if you want to grow and thrive, then you need to maintain control. Amazon and Sprint are dealing with their Hungry Hippos, and you should be, too.

Shortly, I’ll show you exactly how to handle these situations as eloquently as possible. But first, I want to make sure that you are clear, very clear, on a category of customers that you want to make sure to keep.

Your Least Profitable Customers

Now that we’ve determined that some customers need to be fired—and fired immediately—it’s time to switch gears. You see, over the past few years some experts have suggested that businesses have two types of customers—high value and low value—and that our focus needs to be only on the former. These same people have been saying that we need to fire our least profitable customers. I disagree with this approach—strongly!

If you start from a position where you recognize that every customer who enters your business has massive potential value, then you can’t simply make a decision to fire customers who are currently low value. Instead, you need to cultivate them. As we saw with Starbucks in the last chapter, low-value customers can—with the right marketing—be turned into high-value customers.

Remember in Chapter 1 we discussed how some organizations are willing to gamble with their most valuable asset? In fact, many organizations make this critical error in judgment. Your base of customers determines the current value of your business. Furthermore, this asset (your current customers) is the primary source of your company’s expected future value (gauged by both the anticipated profits from current customers as well as any new business/referrals that they generate). Businesses should consider the value of an existing customer based on that customer’s potential future value. Likewise, businesses will only know which customers to focus marketing efforts on (and how) if they segment the data that they collect and move forward in a thoughtful and strategic manner.

Be careful not to fall into the trap of firing customers simply based on their perceived (current, low) value. Go ahead and fire your Hungry Hippos and problem children. They’re not worth your time, energy, and expense. But your less profitable customers? They are almost always worth your efforts.

A COMMONSENSE APPROACH TO CUSTOMER SERVICE

We’ve all experienced the type of customer service that makes us want to pull our hair out. Do you remember the last time you were treated poorly when you interacted with a business? You may have been told that your call was extremely important, and then gone on to wait for thirty-five minutes. You may have been treated rudely in a store. We’ve all had experiences like these, even with companies that claim to be focused on the customer. The company claims to care about us, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. It often ends up feeling like a big sham.

In many organizations customer service is broken and almost beyond repair. These businesses view customer service as simply one of the necessary evils of conducting business and selling their content. Many companies actually farm out customer service to the cheapest bidder or set up call centers in foreign countries where labor is cheap. The phone is being answered—great!—but are these companies really providing any service, or service worth talking about? Truth be told, we all know organizations that would be better off offering no support at all, rather than the so-called support they provide.

And poor service doesn’t just happen at foreign-based call centers. The service at local brick-and-mortar locations can be just as appalling. It just so happens the day before I started writing this chapter, I walked into a store at the local mall to pick up something for my wife. I waited in line as the young woman at the counter took care of a customer in front of me. It quickly became clear that they knew each other. They started talking about how economical oil changes are at Costco, then about Uncle Bill. Then the clerk reminded her customer not to tell anyone that story about Sara. This exchange went on for about five minutes. Then, after the payment was complete, the clerk came out from behind the counter to give hugs and kisses—and start into an entirely new conversation with the same customer—while I waited! Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed.

Here’s an example with a slightly different spin. My wife and I bought a new home. Leading up to and during the transaction, we were overwhelmed by the apparently genuine kindness everyone involved portrayed. The day after the deal closed, however, we never heard from a single one of these people again. The key point to remember is that customer satisfaction, service, and support should be an endeavor that happens before, during, and after the sale. Customer service is the thing that businesses claim to focus on the most; yet it’s the most overlooked aspect of businesses everywhere. So let’s review the basics.

Why Losing Customers Is Very Expensive

Customers are very expensive to lose. Whenever a customer (new or current) walks into your business, you are staring directly into the face of a lot of potential value and money for your organization. I don’t just mean literally walking through your front door, I mean anyone who comes into the realm of your business. They might “come in” via e-mail or the Web. They might call you. It doesn’t matter. Any which way they arrive, that’s a customer who represents tremendous potential value.

It goes to reason that every customer lost costs you literally hundreds, thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it doesn’t end there, because customers refer and recommend new business to your company. So if you lost the person who would have referred additional customers, you can multiply the losses. But things get even worse. Customers who experience negative service tend to tell others. This is amplified via social media and the other various ways our customers are sharing their experiences.

In practical terms, this means you need to find a new customer—or maybe twenty new customers—to replace the current and future value of that single lost customer. We all know it costs so much more money to find that single new customer than it does to care for an existing customer. In his book The Loyalty Effect (mentioned briefly in Chapter 7), Frederick Reichheld suggests that a 5 percent increase in customer retention can increase current customer value by as much as 100 percent.

Why Customer Service Is Broken

Many organizations have policies for customer service. The problem is these policies often come at the expense of common sense. How many times have you personally experienced some sort of service blunder with a company where a miniscule change could have made the difference between keeping you and losing you as a customer? There’s a classic story from the early days of the Internet that had to do with Maddox, one of the first influential bloggers who maintained a website with the understated (no-ego-at-all) domain name thebestpageintheuniverse.net, which had millions of readers. Back in 2004 or 2005, Maddox shared the story of the poor customer service he experienced with travel site Orbitz.

I won’t spoil the whole story, because it’s worth reading for yourself.⁵ In short, Maddox wanted one single thing—a genuine apology. And nobody was willing to give it to him. Maddox’s story is a great example of how one dissatisfied customer has the ability to recount his or her tale to a massive number of people. Remember, this was before social media made it easier for messages to spread faster, farther, and to more people.

Instead of having a customer service policy, consider having an employee empowerment policy. Give your employees the faith, trust, and ability to use their best judgment and make decisions. You might need to give your employees additional training to break them from the customer service policy mindset. Consider, though, giving them simple guidelines and limits to make the best decision for the customer. Tell your employees to do what needs to be done to please the customer.

And don’t worry. I’m not suggesting that you encourage your employees to pander to the wants and needs of every single customer. Far from it. Here’s what I’m suggesting: You need to determine how far you’re willing to go, and at what cost. You need to decide how much flexibility and empowerment you are willing to give your employees. In short, I’m asking you to use common sense when dealing with customer service—and have your employees do the same.

The Importance of Managing Expectations

If you want your company to become Evergreen, you need to make sure your customers’ needs are met and their expectations are exceeded. Remember, this doesn’t mean every customer gets whatever he or she wants, but it does mean you should be willing to go beyond the realm of what’s considered “normal customer satisfaction” in most organizations. When was satisfaction ever enough? Customers don’t want to be satisfied. They want to be surprised, excited, and have their expectations greatly exceeded. To do this, you need to diminish your focus on growth and increase your focus on value. When you understand that business is not about making buckets of money immediately, but serving your customers’ needs and exceeding their expectations, your profits will soar into space.

Organizations can win or lose in the marketplace based on their ability to carefully manage the expectations of their customers. Let me give you an example. Take Southwest Airlines. It is constantly chosen as one of the airlines with the highest customer satisfaction in the world. But why? I mean, really, why? Southwest doesn’t assign seats for its customers. It’s a stampede to get the best seat, and you have to be careful not to get trampled. Customers don’t get a beverage during flights, and there’s no first-class section.

What’s the secret? Well, it’s simple. Southwest has very carefully positioned itself as a low-cost, no-frills airline, and it very carefully manages the expectations about the service it provides. Short of an act of God, Southwest will get you to your destination on time. Once those boarding doors shut, the plane starts barreling down the runway while people are still putting their bags away. It’s remarkable. Of course, the Southwest way isn’t for everyone. But it works for them.

Zappos is on the opposite end of the spectrum, and I’d be crazy to say that Zappos hasn’t been successful. The stories about the extreme lengths Zappos has taken to provide customer service have garnered tremendous publicity. The expectations have been set, and there’s no going back for Zappos. But just like Southwest, the Zappos way isn’t the only way—and, most likely, neither way is your way.

You need to very carefully manage the expectations you create in your customers’ minds. This advice should apply to all of your marketing and customer acquisition endeavors—and, even more important, to your customer retention efforts. Customers need to know what they can expect with your products and services, and the type of support you’ll offer (before, during, and after their interactions with your company). Anything above and beyond is where the magic happens, but promising more and coming up with less is a recipe for disaster.

How carefully is your marketing team managing your customers’ expectations?

Determining the Validity of Complaints

Before we dive headlong into a discussion about how to evaluate the validity of complaints, it is helpful to understand why people complain. In my opinion, people complain for two basic reasons: First, they want something for free. (Harsh, I know—but true.) Second, they have experienced an inconvenience, annoyance, or the like, and they want their grievance to be acknowledged; furthermore, they want to receive an apology, a promise that change is coming, and to know how you’ll follow up. Customer service can be simplified if we recognize that we are typically responding to one of those two basic impulses.

We seem to have a desire to turn customer service, and the art of managing our reputations, into something more than what it actually is. We create manuals for how to deal with every possible scenario. We hire expensive firms to manage our social media profiles for us (which usually can’t be done effectively in this manner—unless these outside firms truly grasp the character and voice of each organization). I’ve helped clients build a far more simplistic model for determining the validity of criticism. When I train customer service, support, and social media teams to foster brand loyalty and address customer concerns, I train them in one very specific area. I want to show them how to accurately answer the following question: Is this complaint, comment, feedback, or review valid or invalid?

Here are two fictitious reviews that I created for the purpose of this book. The goal here is to first determine if the review, feedback, or complaint is valid or invalid.

Review 1: We just got back from our stay at The Fleming Hotel in the heart of Times Square in New York City. We were appalled! We went to bed at 7:00 p.m. and our room was loud. Bright lights flickered and flashed during our entire stay. Yeah, the room had blackout curtains, but they didn’t block out everything. My wife and I had the worst night’s sleep of our lives. I asked the front desk clerk (who was useless by the way) what he intended to do about our stay? We weren’t offered anything. Not a free night, not a free meal—nothing! Needless to say, we’ll never be back.

Is this review valid or invalid?

Response: Invalid. Deciding to stay in the heart of Times Square in New York City comes with some degree of understanding that you will be spending a night at the epicenter of “the city that never sleeps.” That’s not to say a guest isn’t entitled to a good night’s sleep, but expecting silence at the heart of the bustling theater district at seven in the evening is not reasonable. Therefore, the complaint is invalid, and needs to be dealt with as such.

Review 2: We just got back from our stay at the supposedly “exquisite, five-star” Fleming Bed & Breakfast in the mountains of North Carolina. We paid $650 per night. Our bed wasn’t made when we arrived at our room, and there was a pile of hair in the bathtub. The woman at the counter was talking on her cell phone pretty much the entire time we were there. Even as we stood there waiting to talk with her about the state of our room, she took her sweet time getting off the phone! I can’t imagine her Friday night plans were more important than your customers. Needless to say, we’ll never be back.

Is this review valid or invalid?

Response: Valid. Anyone staying in a room that costs $650 in a hotel that’s marketed to customers as being “exquisite, five-star” deserves an experience that closely matches those expectations. In this case, the complaint needs to be addressed in a number of ways. First, management needs to acknowledge the complaint and apologize to the customer. If it was my business, I would be extending the apology on the phone—not via e-mail and not with a response on a review website such as TripAdvisor. A personal touch here is crucial. Second, I would explain to the customer how this situation has been addressed. Essentially, you want to reassure the customer that this type of behavior—or whatever your specific situation might be—is not acceptable, and that you’ve taken the necessary steps to ensure that future customers (including the one who brought the problem to your attention) won’t have this experience again. Third, I might consider compensating the customer in some way. If the customer is given a complimentary night’s stay, I would ensure the priority treatment that had been paid for the first time was delivered during the second visit. I would also follow up with the customer afterward to confirm that everything was up to snuff.

The key to successful customer service is to remember the expectations you’ve created concerning your content—and then to deliver on those expectations.

Responding to Valid and Invalid Complaints

Now that we know how to determine the validity of a complaint or customer service request, it’s important to arm our service teams with tools and knowledge so that they can respond to those service requests appropriately. Figure 8-1 offers a simple diagnostic through which to run your organization’s complaints, criticisms, and feedback.

FIGURE 8-1

Commonsense Customer Service

Invalid Complaint: Always respond to an invalid complaint as though it were valid. Here’s what I mean: Customers want to know they’ve been heard and recognized. Even your Hungry Hippos and problem children deserve a response that acknowledges them. However, take care not to give free content or discounts in response to invalid complaints. You might maintain a history of these requests, as Sprint did, but the key is to respond to the initial service request, complaint, or feedback in a manner that is consistent with that request being valid (see the next section)—even if it is, in fact, overly invalid. In a nutshell, always take the high road initially in an effort to redirect and reframe the customer’s state of mind.

Valid Complaint: Responding to a valid complaint is very simple. You need to design your processes to ensure that responses always address five key areas, as follows: First, apologize. Second, reaffirm who you are—your corporate character—why you do what you, and the values you stand for. (Remember those key points about your company that we discussed in Chapter 3?) Third, state how you are going to handle the situation. Fourth, clarify how you will follow up. And finally, follow through and follow up. In short, rectify the situation so as to minimize the chances that the issue that prompted the valid complaint will happen again.

Handling your customer service efforts doesn’t need to be difficult. Obviously you can do more, but this commonsense approach can be adapted and used in almost any organization of any size.

SCRUTINIZING YOUR COMPANY’S WEAK SPOTS

Every company will deal with unhappy customers at some point during the life of the business. It’s inevitable. In fact, most people in business deal with customer service—related issues day in and day out. Instead of asking how you can provide better and more effective responses to unhappy customers, what if you started asking how you could reduce the number of customer service–related issues year after year?

One of the founding officers of FedEx, Michael Basch, suggested that one of the key components of FedEx’s success was the development of a concept called the Hierarchy of Horrors. I was first introduced to this concept by my good friend and marketing wizard Shawn Veltman, whom I mentioned earlier. Basch writes about the Hierarchy of Horrors in his book, Customer Culture: How FedEx and Other Great Companies Put the Customer First Every Day.⁶ It sounds scarier than it is. Basically, the Hierarchy of Horrors is a relatively short exercise that can drastically improve your company’s performance year after year.

Here’s what FedEx did: FedEx executives created a list of the eight worst things that the company could screw up for its customers, such as missing a scheduled pickup, damaging a customer’s package, losing a package, delivering to the wrong address, delivering late, and so forth. Each of these eight key problem areas was measured for a short period of time using a simple checklist. For instance, each time a package was lost, they ticked a box. If a customer called because a package was damaged, they ticked another box. If a delivery was late and someone complained, another tick.

Then, the FedEx executives added up the results and ranked the eight key areas from bad to worse to worst, according to which horror caused the most grief for its customers. FedEx then systematically worked backward from the highest- to the lowest-priority concerns. Working on a few things at a time gave FedEx the ability to significantly improve the problems. Since the company discovered that late packages caused the most grief, that’s where FedEx focused first, and in so doing FedEx vastly improved the delivery times.

If you want to improve your customer service, I would suggest revisiting the Hierarchy of Horrors in your company at least once a year. It’s a simple four-step process. Here’s how it’s done.

Step One: List Your Company’s Worst Screw-Ups

What are the worst things your company can screw up for your customers? Make a list of five to eight things that cause grief for your customers on a regular basis. When FedEx completed its Hierarchy of Horrors, the executive team was primarily responsible for generating the list. That’s a wonderful way to get started, but I would also get employees from your customer service department on board during the brainstorming process and give them the chance to recount what they hear most often from customers. Likewise, ask your employees to contribute to the dialogue.

If you own a restaurant, for instance, your list might include things such as the food not being cooked properly, the waitstaff messing up an order, and the host double-booking a reservation. If you run an RV dealership, you might include instances where delivery dates weren’t met, customers drove RVs off the dealership lot without completing the pre-delivery inspection process, and sales reps did a poor job of upselling. A tech service company might learn that some of its biggest screwups include things such as unexpected or unscheduled service outages and downtime. A steel manufacturer might realize its biggest screwups include shipping a customer a load of steel covered in rust, or underdelivering a load by a ton or two, or not properly communicating to customers when a massive load is expected to show up.

You get the idea. What will you discover within your organization?

Step Two: Measure the Screwups over a Thirty-Day Interval

Set up a way to measure how many times each of these screwups happens. Keep it simple. You might just create a one-page document that’s checked each time something happens, or you might run daily surveys with customers. You might assign someone in each department to check the box each time the mistake happens. Or even better, you might have someone from outside the department monitor the mistakes. The point is to set up a system to measure how many times each of these mistakes is happening.

Here’s something important to keep in mind: Not all of these mistakes will be geared toward customer grievances. For example, FedEx was looking primarily at internal screwups that impacted the customer experience. However, all of these screwups also had a direct impact on the profitability of the company. FedEx wanted to know how often delivery trucks were late, or how often packages were mishandled. Each time a mistake is made it costs the company a lot more than a single complaint.

You can really start to see how this plays into the concept of Evergreen. If your organization is continually making the same mistakes again and again, do you think your customers are going to stick around? After all, it really doesn’t matter how great your content is if the rest of the customer experience doesn’t measure up.

Step Three: Order Your Results

Sit down with your team and take a good look at the different screwups. Considering that you’re talking about the “horrors”—the worst possible mistakes being made—they’re all going to feel like big issues, but now you need to prioritize them, shuffling the horrors so that they are listed from bad (at the top) to worst (at the bottom).

If you can’t decide how to prioritize, don’t fret. Consider some of the following questions: Are certain horrors screwing up things from not only the customer’s point of view but also an operational point of view? Are some mistakes costing the company far more than others? For example, when I asked a client in the manufacturing sector about his company’s horrors, he said that underdelivering a large order was the single most expensive mistake the company could make, sometimes costing the company tens of thousands of dollars (in addition to greatly upsetting the customer). To me, this would qualify as a high-priority area of improvement. Don’t you think?

Step Four: Examine Your Roadmap—and Get Started

Now you are equipped with a detailed roadmap for addressing the aspects of your business that need a little fixing. Set some goals for improving each individual horror. You might put specific departments in charge of reducing the number of times a specific horror occurs.

You need to ensure there’s accountability for the reduction of the horrors. If one department was making a mistake twice each day, see if it can quickly reduce the occurrence of that mistake to once a day. Also, you should create and accept feedback from those charged with reducing the horrors. Sometimes your employees or parts of your team might have suggestions for ways to drastically reduce the horrors. So the question is: Do you have a system by which members of your team can offer feedback and have it considered and acted upon?

This is such a simple model—and yet one that could have significant impact on any organization. Are you showing your customers a film that allows them to leave the theater smiling and wishing for more—or are you presenting a fright show?

WHY AUTHENTICITY IS IMPORTANT

There’s a classic story in the marketing world about “the roach letter.” It has gained such notoriety that it even has its own entry on Snopes.com, a popular website that either debunks or affirms popular stories. Snopes says the roach letter is pure urban legend. The events could have happened to someone, somewhere, at some time, but the details are so general that they can’t be verified.

Regardless of whether it actually happened, the story is worth recounting. I’ve heard it many times, and it is told different ways each and every time. Here’s one version:

A man boards a pricey international flight from New York to Paris. An hour into the flight, the attendants start serving dinner. The man’s dinner arrives and he begins with a beautiful salad topped with mandarin oranges and cashews. He opens the packet of dressing, pours it on, and begins tossing the salad. That’s when he sees it! Our poor traveler finds a big black cockroach in the bottom of his salad. The passenger quickly buzzes the flight attendant, who apologies profusely. The attendant offers him a new salad, but the traveler is too disgusted to try anything else.

     During the rest of the flight, the passenger can’t get the experience out of his mind. Inside the seat pocket he finds a pamphlet about the airline with a message from the president suggesting that customer satisfaction is the number one priority of this luxury airline. To pass the time, he crafts an angry e-mail, which he is able to send through in-flight Wi-Fi directly to the airline’s president.

     Three weeks pass, and the experience is still top of mind. The customer tells everyone the story of the giant cockroach in his salad. He also tells the part about how he sent a letter to the president of the airline and hasn’t heard squat. And then everything changes. One day FedEx arrives with an envelope. He studies it and quickly realizes it is from the Office of the President of ABC Airline. Surprised, and a little excited, he opens it to find a letter from the president himself, on official letterhead. It reads:

The passenger is amazed. He can’t believe it. Finally, a company that not only listens to its customers, but actually does something about it. Imagine—he was able to single-handedly ground a 747! He puts up his feet, drops the letter on the kitchen table, and can’t help but smile for a moment, relishing the sweet victory. And just then, he notices something. Stuck to the back of the letter he sees what looks like a yellow Post-it note. He flips over the letter and reads the coffee-stained note stuck on the back: “Maryanne, send this jerk the roach letter … Bob.”

This was the moment that our passenger learned the organization didn’t really care about him or his experience at all. He was simply sent the standard form letter that all poor passengers who find cockroaches in their food receive.

Now this is an extreme example, and it doesn’t matter if the original story is true or false. What matters is the moral: We’re living in a time when companies continue to set up systems, shortcuts, macros, and automated responses to handle the most important issues when it comes to dealing with customers. These days organizations pretend to be personal and have a genuine human touch, but they rely on form letters and canned responses created to deal with common customer issues.

The good news is that it’s never been easier to be authentic. When you come to understand your corporate character and how you want to be perceived by customers and potential customers, it’s a heck of a lot easier to be real with those who want to do business with you. When you understand that customer service doesn’t need to be treated like rocket science, but rather a simple process whereby you ensure your customers’ experience matches the one they were promised, then you can’t help but get it right. Are you communicating authentically with your customers or are you sending roach letters?

Remember our goal in providing customer service is to love our customers, treat them honestly and with respect, and allow them to grow with our organizations. Doing so will exponentially improve your chances of becoming Evergreen.