Even the best of us are capable of providing bad service at times. These excuses have rattled around in my head more one than once. What about you?
- It isn’t part of your job description.
- You’re overworked and underpaid.
- The customer is not always right.
- You had a terrible day and just need to be alone.
- You don’t have the right tools to deliver great service.
- Your customers just want a good deal, they don’t care about the experience.
- The customer is unreasonable and rude.
- Another department is responsible for what the customer wanted.
- Your company hasn’t made customer service a priority.
- Your bonus isn’t based on customer service, so why spend any time on it.
- The customer didn’t complain, so they must have been happy.
- You had too much to do and other people were waiting. You couldn’t spend all that time with just one customer.
Every single one of those things will probably be true at one point or another.
Whether you choose to accept them as an excuse is up to you.
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Unfortunately it is quite common to find those excuses (scenarios) as a way to conceal the real reason of the action. There is no way, any person, any company should have any excuse to provide bad customer service. What it should be done instead, is to treat those excuses as the challenges to overcome to be able to provide excellent customer service. Being in charge of delivering customer experiences means to be creative in finding the solutions. Any time, any person, any company, accepts and excuse, they should seriously reconsider to do something different outside the scope of Customer Service.
Tim: You hit the nail on the head! Do you want to know how many reasons there actually are for bad customer service? Under any and all circumstances the number is………..ZERO!
Wise are those who learn how the bottom line doesn’t also have being their priority.
There are 2 types of companies, the ones that work to try to charge more and those who work to charge less. We are the 2nd.
Hi Tim, I agree any business should consider these as unacceptable excuses for giving bad customer service. To me, good customer service is about operational excellence in delivering a service more than it is about ‘customer friendliness’ of the frontline staff (although that should also not be left to chance).
So to me these ‘excuses’ are symptoms rather of ‘bad management’, more than of bad attitude on the part of the frontline staff. To me these excuses indicate that the business’ management and leadership have failed to design the desired service experience and fail to support their frontline staff in delivering it. They are essentially leaving it to chance.
To take a few of your examples:
Excuse #5 “You don’t have the right tools to deliver great service.” Now this may indeed be the excuse of a bored, inflexible, lazy, etc. employee, or it may actually be true that management are leaving their frontline staff to deal with whatever comes, and have no regard for what service excellence is and how to support their staff in delivering it.
Excuse #8 “Another department is responsible for what the customer wanted.” Sure, some flexibility on the part of frontline staff to apply some common sense thinking, some initiative and thinking from the customer’s perspective should be expected. But this also means that frontline staff have (been granted) the empowerment to actually make such decisions. And if that particular customer issue is a recurring theme, then who do we really look to to improve things? In both cases, we should have higher expectations of management in how they organise their service delivery and how they support their frontline staff.
Excuse #12 “You had too much to do and other people were waiting.” Why is there a line of customers? Was this really unexpected, or does this happen every Friday afternoon? Are there any contingency actions, such as other staff stepping in to assist? Why did that person have too much to do; were they doing things they shouldn’t be doing? Each of these things is something we would expect managers and leaders to manage.
Cheers, Little Hinges
I love this post! You’d think customers would be a little considerate when you’ve not raised your voice.
Tim, just wanted to say that your blog is beautiful, and the content is so interesting and well presented. I was asked recently asked for a list of favorite blogs, and your blog was front and center on the list. Many thanks.
Customer service is one of the most important aspects that companies should focus on. Certain companies are renowned as having excellent service where staff are always happy to help, whereas others are known to have poor service. Having good customer service will make people want to visit the store/restaurant etc again.
There is noticeably a bundle to learn about this. I assume you made certain nice factors in options also.