We called a company to request what the industry refers to as a “courtesy credit. ” We first navigated the phone system, which requires the talents of Indiana Jones minus the hat and whip. The feeling of finally finding a real person must be similar to Indiana’s relief when he’s defeated all obstacles and the treasure is safely in hand.
What we didn’t anticipate was a customer service representative who, intentionally or not, liked to lay down some verbal booby traps. He explained our account didn’t qualify for a courtesy credit. Why? He listed possible reasons. Which reason applied to us? He didn’t know.
We asked if we could speak to someone else who might further assist us with our request. He said yes, but our statement apparently wasn’t clear enough. After some silence, he asked whom we were interested in talking to. “Your mother! We would like to talk to your mother and explain you’re being difficult.” We actually asked for a supervisor, which we thought was obvious but clearly needed to spell out in more detail. After another pregnant pause, customer secret agent man double-checked if we wanted to speak to a supervisor now as if scheduling a call for next month might be an option. When agreeing to make the connection, he couldn’t help but point out moving up the chain might not help.
When the supervisor later joined us, she might as well been his mother. She was nice, sweet, professional and granted our courtesy credit as if she was handing us a batch of chocolate chip cookies with a glass of milk. Her son seemed more like Dennis The Menace or Mr. Mayhem we see in those insurance commercials laughing at us at the other end of the line. Yes, we got our courtesy credit but after how much frustration and time wasted?
Give your front line employees some authority to make simple decisions that require mostly a strong dose of common sense. If employees can’t give what customers want, give them the tools to specifically explain why. If customers want to speak to supervisors or someone’s mom, train employees not to treat the request like an act of Congress. And don’t encourage those on the customer service team to discourage customers from seeking a supervisor’s help. Employees often tell us supervisors may not offer us a different result but they almost always do.
We don’t have an Indiana Jones hat handy. But sometimes we desperately feel like we need one.