What Role Will You Play Today?
Emphasizing the Primary Responsibility to Delight Customers
I played many roles when I was a teenager working in a local clothing store.
On most days, I focused on delivering outstanding customer service by greeting every customer who came into my department and using my product knowledge to help customers find the perfect outfits in the right size. I tried to project a fun, upbeat attitude to help make customers’ shopping experiences pleasant and easy.
Sometimes I played the role of cashier. I still tried to deliver terrific customer service, but my focus was narrower. There was a steady stream of customers paying for their purchases on busy days, so I worked hard to be both pleasant and efficient. On slower days, I ventured away from the cash register to tidy up merchandise in the immediate area, but I didn’t wander too far so that I wouldn’t miss someone who was ready to be rung up.
Once a week my role was stocking the latest deliveries of jeans. I stationed myself on the sales floor with a box of them, removing each pair from the box, attaching an alarm tag, folding them, and organizing them according to size on our display. I still assisted customers, but I was less proactive about service because my main goal was to empty out as many boxes of jeans as I could before the end of my shift.
A couple of times each week, I worked a closing shift. When we worked closing, we couldn’t go home for the evening until the entire store had been vacuumed and all the clothes straightened and put away. The dressing rooms had to be cleaned, too, and the trash taken out. Nobody wanted to stay late, so we would cheat a little and start cleaning up about an hour before closing time. Customers who came in a few minutes before closing were unlikely to get much help since we were preoccupied with cleaning.
Occasionally my role focused on theft prevention. I’d been trained to spot potential shoplifters and was expected to follow them around the store. Some people quickly left when they realized they were being watched, some turned out to be great customers who made large purchases, and others simply got annoyed when they realized they were being followed. Ironically, the term for hassling potential thieves was “customer servicing.”
In this chapter, we’ll examine the strong connection between the level of customer service employees provide and their understanding of the role they are playing. We’ll see how employees often define their role in terms of the tasks they are asked to complete rather than the assistance their customers want. We’ll also learn how, in some extreme cases, otherwise good people can find themselves treating their customers horribly due to a twisted sense of their responsibilities or blind obedience to an unethical or uncaring boss. Companies that wish to deliver outstanding customer service must ensure their employees know their ultimate responsibility is serving the customer.
Many customer service employees I speak with define their roles by the tasks they perform. If they’re cashiers, they say, “I ring up purchases.” If they work in technical support, they say, “I fix computers.” If they’re receptionists, they say, “I greet visitors.”
But these descriptions don’t describe how these employees should actually be helping their customers. Customers want cashiers to make paying for purchases a fast and hassle-free experience. Customers want technical support reps to help them minimize the lost productivity and aggravation that comes with a malfunctioning computer. Customers want receptionists to make them feel welcome and connect them with the person they came to visit.
This task focus is often the cause of poor customer service because the ultimate goal of delighting customers fades into the background. Let’s say you order a new cell phone online, but the company sends the wrong model. You follow the directions on the packing slip and call the customer service department for a return authorization number so that you can return the phone and get the one you ordered. In that moment, you’re feeling disappointed that you can’t use your new cell phone, annoyed that you have to go through the hassle of returning the one they sent, and frustrated because the company requires you to jump through hoops before it will fix its mistake and send the correct one.
What’s the customer service representative’s role in this situation? The focus should be on turning around a disappointing, annoying, and frustrating experience. Unfortunately, task-oriented employees are likely to think their primary goal is to issue the return authorization number so that they can quickly move on to the next call. The length of their call might even be closely measured, giving them an extra incentive to get you off the phone quickly. As a result, they miss the opportunity to wholeheartedly apologize or perhaps send the replacement phone right away via express delivery if you were counting on having the new phone in time for, say, an upcoming trip.
Customers in this situation may inadvertently contribute to the task orientation by telling the customer service rep, “I just want to get the phone I ordered.” That may be a statement spoken out of frustration, yet it can also signal to the customer service rep that issuing the return authorization number is the most important task, since that is the first step in the company’s normal procedure for getting the correct phone to the customer.
Sometimes, this task orientation can lead to reprehensible service. An estimated 14,000 people are mistakenly declared dead by the Social Security Administration each year. If you’re one of them, it can be a financial nightmare, since your banking, credit cards, and credit reports are all tied to your Social Security number. As ridiculous as it may sound, the biggest hassle of all might be convincing a Social Security employee that you are still alive.
People victimized by this error report getting the runaround, having to make multiple trips to their local Social Security office, and being required to complete mountains of paperwork just to prove they aren’t deceased.1 Instead of receiving compassion, a heartfelt apology, and a swift resolution, the victims are frequently stonewalled by bureaucrats who view their primary role as complying with processing procedures. Fixing this error can take as long as two months, and it’s even been reported that more paperwork is required to reinstate someone erroneously considered deceased than is needed to accidentally declare a person dead in the first place!2
Sometimes, task orientation can lead to downright strange behavior. I once went into my local sporting goods store to get a pair of insoles for my running shoes. A sales associate approached me after I’d been browsing for a few minutes and asked if I needed assistance. I told him what I was looking for and asked if the insoles I had in my hand would fit the bill. He said they would and stuck a small sticker on the box.
“That was weird,” I thought.
I browsed for a few more minutes and saw another brand of insoles that caught my eye. Suddenly, the sales associated reappeared. I showed him the box of insoles I’d just picked up and told him I was thinking of buying them instead of the first pair. Rather than commenting on whether I was making a good decision, he said, “Okay, let me get a sticker on that.” He put another small sticker on the new box.
I later learned that the store was trying to track how many sales were generated by each associate and the stickers corresponded to their ID numbers. The store manager had implemented the sticker program in an attempt to better monitor employee performance and, ultimately, learn how to boost sales, but the unintended result was emphasizing ID stickers over customer service. I can imagine the manager contributing to this task focus by issuing frequent reminders: “Don’t forget to put your ID sticker on every product you sell so that you can get credit for the sale!”
The challenge, as we discussed in Chapter 7, is that tasks are usually easier to monitor than the outcomes. The manager at the sporting goods store would have had to spend more time on the sales floor observing sales associates to see which ones were truly helping customers and exhibiting good sales behaviors. The sticker program was enticing because it allowed the manager to use a sales report to track performance without ever leaving the office. The blind spot in this system, as was evident from my experience, was that affixing a sticker to an item a customer purchased wasn’t necessarily an indicator that an associate had anything to do with generating that sale.
The cure for excessive task orientation is aligning employee responsibilities with the clearly defined customer service culture we discussed in Chapter 6. Employees should be focused on helping customers achieve their goals rather than following a set of rote procedures. Companies can take their service levels to new heights once their employees understand and embrace their role in delivering customer delight.
The Apple Store provides an excellent example of what can happen when employees focus intently on their customers. Unlike many other retailers where employees concentrate on pushing products, stocking shelves, or ringing up transactions, Apple Store employees are there to create a positive experience for their customers. They conduct product demonstrations, resolve technical problems, and help people get the most out of their MacBook, iPad, or other Apple product. According to Ron Johnson, the former Apple executive who created the Apple Store, every employee has one primary responsibility: “Their job is to figure out what you need and help you get it, even if it’s a product Apple doesn’t carry.”3
The results of Apple’s customer focus have been impressive. The Apple Store has become widely recognized for a high level of customer service, making Bloomberg Businessweek’s annual list of Customer Service Champs every year from 2007 to 2010.4 This approach also translated into outstanding financial results, with retail analyst RetailSails reporting in 2011 that the Apple Store had the best sales per square foot of any U.S. retailer.5 (Sales per square foot is a common measure of retail sales efficiency and is obtained by dividing a store’s gross revenue by its square footage.)
Employees sometimes struggle to transition from being task-focused to becoming customer-focused, so I’ve developed a couple of exercises that can be used to change an employee’s perspective. The first exercise requires members of a department or team to describe their role from their customer’s point of view. In other words, what would you like your customers to say you do for them? Here are a few examples from some of my clients:
• Sales reps at a flower and plant wholesaler decided their role was helping florists (their primary customer) grow their businesses by helping them select flowers and plants that will sell well in their shops.
• Information technology employees working on a college campus determined that their role was helping faculty and staff minimize downtime from malfunctioning computers.
• Call center agents at a medical device manufacturer realized their role was helping to save lives by making sure the right products got to the right doctor in time to help the patients who need them.
The second exercise helps employees integrate this customer focus into their daily activities. Employees start by writing a thank-you letter from an imaginary customer addressing it to themselves. The letter should describe what the employee did and how it helped the customer. Here’s an example from when I did the exercise myself:
Dear Jeff,
Thank you for being our trusted partner. Your commitment to helping us achieve our goals is the reason you are the first and only phone call when we need help improving customer service.
Thank you!
A. Client
Next, ask employees to read their thank-you letter at the start of each day for three weeks. They should think about what they would need to do for their customers to feel that way.
Finally, ask employees to try to get feedback from a customer that matches their letter. The feedback can be in the form of an actual letter, an e-mail, a response to a survey, or even a verbal compliment. When I did this exercise, I e-mailed a client and asked her if she would write a short testimonial for my website. I made no mention of my thank-you letter exercise, but her response was very close to what I had written in my fictitious letter. Here is what she wrote:
If I had to choose only one outside company to help with some training initiatives this year, that would be Toister Performance Solutions; Jeff is reliable, dependable, and flexible to incorporate the organizational culture in whatever he presents.
In 1971, psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stanford University to observe the psychology of imprisonment. He recruited twenty-four male college students who were randomly divided into two groups. Members of one group were designated as prisoners while members of the other group were the prison guards. The study was intended to take place over the course of two weeks in a mock prison where the guards were instructed to watch over the prisoners.
What happened during the experiment took Zimbardo completely by surprise. Many of the students posing as prison guards soon began engaging in psychologically and even sexually abusive behavior toward the prisoners. Many of the prisoners began to exhibit signs of severe emotional distress. The results were so shocking that the experiment had to be halted after just six days.6
Zimbardo’s controversial research revealed that ordinarily good people are capable of terrible things when they’re put in the wrong environment. These situations start with an adversarial relationship between a group of evildoers and their victims that eventually worsens as people take small steps that unwittingly lead them to increasingly deplorable behavior. The behavior is allowed to continue because nobody in the group is either willing or able to recognize the path they are on and bring it to the attention of the other members.7
I certainly wouldn’t put bad customer service on the same plane as the horrible acts that Zimbardo has studied, but his research can help us understand how ordinarily good employees can do terrible things to their customers.
Consider the example of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). I’m a frequent traveler, and the majority of TSA agents I encounter are friendly and professional. They have a tough job, and most of them seem dedicated to helping provide a safe and efficient travel experience.
Unfortunately, there are a few TSA agents who subject passengers to rude and unfriendly treatment. The worst offenders have been accused of fondling, groping, and humiliating passengers through the use of security procedures put into effect in late 2010. In November of that year, the American Civil Liberties Union received more than 900 complaints from passengers who felt their civil rights had been violated by TSA agents. The complaints include descriptions of invasive pat-downs that were aggressively carried out in front of other travelers. Some of the complainants were so uncomfortable that they broke down in tears and vowed never to fly again.8
How can some TSA agents treat people so horribly? It starts with an “us” versus “them” approach, where some agents view their primary mission as compliance and crowd control. This effect is enhanced by the uniform and badge worn by TSA agents, which reinforces their position as authority figures.
Many of the TSA agents I come into contact with are polite, friendly, and helpful, but quite a few are taking those first few steps down the slippery slope of evil that Zimbardo describes. These individuals shout at passengers, issue seemingly arbitrary orders, and make demeaning statements about travelers they believe aren’t complying quickly enough.
Zimbardo also noted that evil can flourish when it is passively accepted by members of the group. There have been several other TSA agents present each time I’ve encountered an abusive agent. The other agents were all within sight and earshot of the agent who was acting out of line, but none of them chose to intervene (at least not publicly). This sends a clear signal that the agent’s inappropriate behavior is condoned, which increases the likelihood that the poor behavior will continue.
Another example of inhumane customer treatment is the infamous robo-signer home foreclosure scandal. The scandal erupted in the fall of 2010 when major lenders such as GMAC Mortgage were accused of employing people who indiscriminately signed off on thousands of foreclosure notices. These employees, dubbed “robo-signers,” were approving documents that caused people to lose their homes while shirking their most important responsibility: verifying that no homes were mistakenly foreclosed upon.9
Jeffrey Stephan, one of the so-called robo-signers employed by GMAC, gave a deposition in one of the many ensuing lawsuits. His testimony illuminated a mix of factors that contributed to employees like him blindly signing off on thousands of foreclosures. He described how he would sign off on as many as 400 foreclosure notices per day, leaving little time to examine each one. There was no direct contact with homeowners, and Stephan looked solely at the figures presented in the foreclosure notices before signing them, so he was able to take a clinical approach without considering the consequences of his actions. He did his work by following procedures that he was taught through informal training and apparently never questioned what he was being asked to do. From his perspective, it was clear he thought his role was reviewing paperwork and not displacing families from their homes.10
TSA and GMAC are extreme examples, but smaller versions are encountered every day in customer service. There are plenty of employees who have come to believe their role is to stonewall, belittle, or otherwise treat their customers poorly. The lesson from Zimbardo’s work is that these employees may not be the inherently bad people we believe them to be. Rather, they are part of an inherently bad system that brings out the worst in people.
Of course, it’s also possible for an inherently good system to bring out the best in people. We’ve described in previous chapters how companies can make it easier for employees to focus on delighting their customers. Here are a few examples:
• Empower employees to be unreasonably generous to customers (Chapter 2).
• Put employees in a position where they are intrinsically motivated to do the right thing for their customers (Chapter 3).
• Eliminate policies that create conflict between customers and employees (Chapter 4).
• Root out systemic problems that cause poor service (Chapter 5).
• Create a customer-focused culture (Chapter 6).
• Make service a priority for all employees (Chapter 7).
This is a great start, but sometimes employees need a little more help understanding that service comes first. As an example, there’s the case of the Transportation and Parking Department at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). Like many universities, parking at OHSU is in short supply, so it employs parking enforcement officers who are responsible for patrolling the various parking lots on campus and citing vehicles that are parked illegally.
However, the enforcement efforts were creating some customer service headaches. The citations issued generated numerous complaints and were frequently appealed. It got so bad that the department had to assign extra staff to handle the growing backlog of appeals. Even worse, the appeals process resulted in many of the citations being overturned, which meant that customers had been needlessly angered and inconvenienced.
Brett Dodson managed the enforcement team and wanted to improve customer service. He knew the key was for his team to spend more time engaging in dialogue with drivers, explaining rules, and providing friendly warnings rather than issuing so many citations. Many of his enforcement officers were having a hard time embracing this vision, though. They relished the opportunity to issue a violation and viewed their role as catching people parking where they shouldn’t. A few of the enforcement officers would even watch for someone to park illegally and then wait until the driver left the vehicle so they could write a ticket rather than ask that person to park somewhere else.
Dodson decided to try a novel approach. For two months, enforcement officers weren’t allowed to issue citations from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. each day. These were the hours when most violations traditionally occurred, but Dodson sent his parking enforcement officers out without the handheld computers they needed to issue citations. Their handhelds were returned to them at 10:00 a.m., but they were told not to issue a citation unless they had first provided a warning.
It took a couple of months of ongoing effort, but eventually Dodson’s work paid off. Individually, most parking enforcement officers learned to gain better compliance by educating drivers and offering alternatives. The number of appealed citations dropped significantly, freeing up the equivalent of two full-time employees to concentrate on other tasks. Even better, scores on the department’s customer satisfaction survey improved dramatically.
Philip Zimbardo’s research on what makes good people do evil things is hard for many people to accept. Most of us can’t imagine sexually harassing a subject in a psychology experiment, yelling at confused travelers, or unthinkingly signing a document that will cause someone to lose her home. We’d like to believe we would take the high road and question authority when faced with one of those scenarios.
Another prominent psychologist, Stanley Milgram, demonstrated that under the right conditions the average person will blindly obey an order to do harm. Milgram conducted his classic obedience experiment in 1961. In it, subjects were instructed to give electric shocks to a person in an adjacent room whenever that person gave an incorrect answer to a memorization test. Unbeknownst to the subject, the person in the other room was actually an actor, and electric shocks weren’t really being transmitted. The actor responded to the test questions using a push-button device that signaled the answer, but most of the questions were deliberately answered incorrectly.
The initial shocks were a mild 15 volts. The subjects were told to increase the voltage with each incorrect answer by turning a dial on an apparatus that had voltage designations ranging from 15 to 450. When the voltage reached 300, the subject heard the victim banging loudly on the wall of the adjacent room. The victim stopped responding entirely after the voltage reached 315 (labeled Extreme Intensity Shock on the dial), but the subjects were told to treat a nonresponse as an incorrect answer and continue administering the shocks. The shocks continued through 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) and even until the dial reached 450 volts (labeled XXX).
Incredibly, 65 percent of the subjects continued administering electric shocks all the way until the voltage reached the maximum 450. Nobody refused to participate in the electric shock experiment after being told about the initial setup, and every subject administered at least 300 volts. Only five out of forty subjects (12 percent) stopped their participation in the experiment when they heard the victim banging on the wall.
Most of the subjects became visibly uncomfortable, and many of them voiced concerns about what they were doing to the person administering the experiment. When subjects displayed signs of reluctance, the experimenter told subjects they must continue, and by and large they obeyed. These scary results show that people can easily be led to blindly follow directions, even when it should be obvious that those directions may result in harm.11
America Online (AOL) provides a real-world example of how blind obedience can result in ludicrous actions. In June 2006, Vincent Ferrari called AOL to cancel his membership. Over the course of a five-minute call, Ferrari repeatedly asked the AOL representative to cancel the membership. Instead of quickly handling the request, the customer service rep tried to talk Ferrari into remaining a member. When that didn’t work, he resorted to talking down to Ferrari and stonewalling his request. Ferrari recorded the phone call and posted the audio to his blog, where it quickly went viral.12
This was not an isolated incident. Complaints about the treatment of customers trying to cancel AOL service had dogged the company for years. In 2004, two years before Ferrari posted the infamous customer service call on his blog, AOL settled several lawsuits from members who were still being billed after they tried to cancel their accounts.13
The poor treatment administered by AOL customer service representatives was a direct result of the way AOL handled account closures. In 2006, customers who wished to cancel their service were directed to a department called the “retention queue” and spoke with “retention consultants.” These employees were paid bonuses to retain customers who called to cancel and were required to make a minimum of two retention offers before processing a cancellation request.14 Clearly, the role of the retention consultant had nothing to do with outstanding customer service. It’s hard to imagine another customer service scenario where employees are explicitly instructed to argue with a customer and encouraged to disregard reasonable requests.
What could happen if customer service representatives thought of disobeying a boss’s order because they knew it would result in poor service? If you recall from Chapter 4, employees often weigh the risks and rewards of various options when their employer’s poor policies cause them to choose between angering a customer or angering their boss. The risk/reward calculation might still make obedience the most likely option.
Larry (not his real name) worked as a customer service representative for a company in severe financial difficulty. The company was struggling to make payments to the contractors it relied on to serve clients. Larry and his coworkers received countless phone calls each day from angry contractors threatening to stop working until their past-due invoices were paid.
The payments weren’t coming, but Larry was instructed to lie to contractors so they’d continue working. He was told to blame it on a paperwork error or on some other administrative delay. As a last resort, Larry could transfer the caller to a voice-mail box to leave a message for a manager—a manager Larry knew wouldn’t be returning calls.
Treating contractors this way went against every customer service instinct Larry had, but he dutifully obeyed because disobeying orders could cost Larry his job. He had been unemployed for more than a year before he got this position, and he knew how tough the job market was. He considered himself lucky not to be among the employees who were recently laid off. Larry empathized with the unpaid contractors, but he had bills of his own to pay.
If you’ve read this far in the book, there’s a good chance you are genuinely interested in delivering outstanding service. You can’t envision yourself or your employees knowingly engaging in abusive acts toward your customers. The research conducted by Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram suggests that otherwise-good people are capable of terrible acts when faced with a combination of the wrong conditions. So, the opposite must be true as well. You can steer your employees in the proper direction by creating the right conditions for outstanding service.
Many of these steps have already been covered in previous chapters or discussed elsewhere in this one, so there’s no sense in rehashing everything. However, there are three reminders that I think are important for customer service leaders.
First, if you look closely at most customer service scandals, there is usually a company spokesperson who emphatically denies that poor customer treatment is the normal way of doing business. This action may seem noble on the surface, but what it really tells you is that either senior managers had no idea what was going on in their own company or they are distancing themselves from their employees in an effort to find a scapegoat. Chapter 4 discussed how important it is for leaders to have direct contact with customers and frontline employees. Having a genuine understanding of your customers’ needs makes it far less likely that you’ll ask your employees to carry out an unfair or unfavorable policy. You’ll also be more attuned to your employees’ behavior and can quickly guide them in the right direction if they get off course.
Second, leaders must be stewards of the company’s customer service culture. As we discussed in Chapter 6, your policies, decisions, and approach to leading others will signal to employees whether you are truly committed to customer service. In the organizations we examined as examples, like the Social Security Administration, TSA, GMAC, or AOL, the customer was clearly unimportant to senior leaders at that time or else their widespread mistreatment of customers would never have happened. On the other hand, when service is a priority, such as at Apple or OHSU, organizations usually have results to prove they really do care about their customers.
Finally, leaders periodically find themselves having to prioritize between cost or customers. We’ll cover this dilemma in greater detail in Chapter 11, but there have been plenty of examples throughout this book where a leader has chosen one over the other. GMAC wouldn’t have allowed its employees to cut so many corners in order to foreclose on homes quickly and cheaply if these customers had been important to them, but it happened because company executives were committed to bolstering the bottom line. Conversely, OHSU wouldn’t have forgone so much ticket revenue if it didn’t believe it was more important to provide a high level of service to the thousands of faculty, staff, employees, patients, and guests who visited the campus every day.
Solution Summary: Helping Employees Establish the Right Roles
As the examples in this chapter illustrate, the service that employees provide is often dictated by the role they’re playing. Great things can happen when employees understand their primary role is serving customers at the highest level. Getting employees to make that commitment requires a conscious decision and the right working conditions.
Here is a summary of the solutions that can help your customer service representatives make the right choice:
• Align employee responsibilities with your company’s service philosophy so that they will naturally deliver outstanding service when they are doing their jobs correctly.
• Have employees write a description of their jobs and the value they provide to their customers.
• Use the “thank-you note” exercise to help employees integrate a customer focus into their daily activities.
• Take extreme measures, if necessary, to avoid poor customer treatment and to compel your customer service reps to find new ways to achieve results (recalling the example of OHSU taking away its parking enforcement officers’ ability to write tickets so they would instead focus on educating the public to comply with parking rules). Avoid creating working conditions that could lead employees to subject their customers to poor treatment by maintaining a direct connection to customers and frontline employees, acting as a steward of your organization’s customer-focused culture, and understanding when to prioritize service over short-term cost efficiency.
Notes
1. Blake Ellis, “Social Security Wrongly Declares 14,000 People Dead Each Year,” CNNMoney.com, August 22, 2011.
2. Alex Johnson and Nancy Amons, “ ‘Resurrected,’ but Still Wallowing in Red Tape,” MSNBC.com, February 29, 2008.
3. Ron Johnson, “What I Learned Building the Apple Store,” HBR Blog Network, Harvard Business Review, November 21, 2011.
4. According to Bloomberg Businessweek’s annual list of Customer Service Champs at www.businessweek.com, Apple was ranked No. 18 in 2007, No. 21 in 2008, No. 20 in 2009, and No. 3 in 2010. The Bloomberg Businessweek list was compiled each year from 2007 to 2010 in conjunction with data from J.D. Power and Associates and its own reader surveys.
5. “RetailSails Exclusive: Ranking U.S. Chains by Retail Sales per Square Foot,” news release, August 23, 2011; http://retailsails.com/2011/08/23/retailsails-exclusive-ranking-u-s-chains-by-retail-sales-per-square-foot/.
6. There is a wealth of information about this study on the Stanford Prison Experiment website: www.prisonexp.org.
7. Philip Zimbardo’s presentation at the 2008 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference provides a good overview of his extensive research; see “Philip Zimbardo Shows How People Become Monsters … or Heroes,” http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html.
8. American Civil Liberties Union, “ACLU Reports More Than 900 Complaints This Month over Enhanced TSA Security Measures,” news release, November 24, 2010.
9. David Streitfeld, “Bank of America to Freeze Foreclosure Cases,” New York Times, October 1, 2010.
10. Oral deposition of Jeffrey D. Stephan, Maine District Court, District 9, Federal National Mortgage Association v. Bradbury and GMAC Mortgage, LLC, June 7, 2010.
11. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963), pp. 371–378.
12. Randall Stross, “AOL Said, ‘If You Leave Me I’ll Do Something Crazy,’” New York Times, July 2, 2006.
13. Juan Carlos Perez, “AOL Settles Billing Lawsuits,” PCWorld.com, June 4, 2004.
14. Stross, “AOL Said, ‘If You Leave Me I’ll Do Something Crazy’.”