The following are approximately the first 1000 words from Chapter 19 of Jonar Nader’s book,
How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People.

Customer service — my foot!

Never mind the ‘wow’, just get rid of the ‘arrrh’

It is a fact of corporate life that no enterprise is in the business of ‘service’. Despite initial denials, no-one can dispute this shock–horror. Corporations are not there to serve anybody. At best, they sometimes operate under a clear mission — but serving people is not one of them. Motherhood statements are a dime-a-dozen. Chief executive officers (CEOs) still kid themselves, espousing customer-care or customer-delight or service excellence. They believe that they are out to put the ‘wow’ into customer satisfaction. Well, never mind the ‘wow’, just get rid of the ‘arrrh’. (For ideas about improving customer service in the non-profit or government sectors, refer to Chapter 20, ‘Lip-service’.)

At your next dinner party, start a conversation about customer service and watch as guests eagerly share their hair-raising experiences. From heart-stopping airport sagas to shopping soap operas, there is no shortage of drama when it comes to service.

My friends delight in my unfortunate stories about ‘service’ and plead with me to retell them because they find the detail fascinating, interesting and, above all, entertaining. The more traumatic the experience, the more laughter I encounter over a late-night gathering. My misfortunes are now in high demand. I collect memorabilia associated with most of my conflicts and show these at lectures and public debates. My multimedia presentations have audiences in stitches, gasping for air, as I tell them about the funny things that happened to me on the way to the forum. At times I feel that the audience would have every right to suspect that I am spinning a yarn or stretching the truth. My struggles often sound so unreal that I worry about coming across as incredible.

For years, I have been saying that service in most industries is so atrocious, it brings me to the point of having to invent violent words merely to come close to exclaiming my dissatisfaction with any degree of accuracy.

This chapter is not about countless anecdotes or mushy customer-service stories. I don’t care to hear any more about who did what to whom at that famous department store, or what happened on Flight 42. There is no place for such page-fillers in a serious book like this.

Are you ready for a sex change?

What is it that customer service hinges on? The single most important element is ‘speed’. However, before an organisation decides to engage in customer service, it must treat the decision with all the due diligence that one would afford to the notion of a sex change.

If, after exhaustive deliberation, an organisation decides that service is the way to go, it must then make it clear to all concerned that ‘customer service’ means doing for the customer whatever the customer wants. It does not matter what this is — for such is the burden of ‘missionary’ work.

In doing for the customer whatever the customer demands, speed must be the key factor. Within this framework, an organisation is promising to invent new systems and processes within a matter of seconds — and this sounds unrealistic for most bureaucracies. Therefore, it might pay for honest organisations to own up and call it like it is. We would then no longer suffer false promises such as those expounded in advertisements, showing a half-naked traveller clutching a telephone outside a village café in Timbuktu, recounting his sad plight to some sympathetic operator who manages to replace his debit card within twenty-four hours, find him a local neurosurgeon, and set him up in some swanky hotel with a cash advance and a new Armani wardrobe — delivered pressed, with starch; on a hanger, please.

Instead of grand promises, we will begin to see some self-truths in advertising, with body copy that reads, ‘You might have to wait more than five minutes in our bank queue, but at least you know that our low overheads will mean lower interest rates on your home loan.’ The decent might say, ‘Our airport service stinks, but we put all our money in safer aeroplanes.’

The day that frequent-flyer programs, economy-class travel, and gold memberships disappear, we might see the end of the ‘regular-customer’ epidemic.

Businesses fail when they set out to treat regular customers differently from irregular ones. In essence, this action eventually translates into treating irregular customers less well than the regular ones. Besides, in large organisations, not all staff members would be able to distinguish between the two. It amounts to asking staff to differentiate between groups, and to treat each group differently. This intangible process fails because, in the intangible world, the weakest element dominates. (For more on tangibles and intangibles, see Chapter 13, ‘Come do the nanomation with me’.)

If a person is honest only some of the time, that person is not honest at all. Integrity is not something that can be applied selectively. One is either honourable all the time or none of the time. Similarly, staff members need to be courteous all the time. They need to excel in everything they do. They must capture every opportunity to win a customer. With this in mind, serving ‘gold’ or ’platinum’ members goes against the grain.

Those who construct loyalty programs through frequent-flyer points, and the like, are merely trying to trap the customer. Loyalty must come naturally, not via points and schemes. If your customers are loyal to you as a result of such programs, they are not loyal. Such schemes are tangible, and tangible things are susceptible to the law of annihilation. Anything that you do can be matched by your competitor. Frequent-flyer points have become a serious financial burden to airlines. However, which airline dares to be the first to cancel its scheme? Having the scheme no longer provides a competitive advantage, but not having the scheme would create an unattractive deficiency — unless something of perceived equal value takes its place. In short, this makes the scheme more of a burden to the organisation than it is a benefit to the customer.

Customer loyalty is intangible — meaning that it must come from the heart. In business, matters of the heart come from atmosphere and attitude. Do you have the atmosphere and attitude within your organisation to win the heart of each customer? Only then can you count on loyalty. (For more on atmosphere and attitude, see Chapter 13, ‘Come do the nanomation with me’.)