Service In The Age Of Facebook

Yesterday someone was supposed to come from the cable company and install the converter for cable phone service. They never showed.

Later yesterday a sales rep from a door-to-door knife company was supposed to come out the house and sharpen the expensive set of knives we bought three years ago, and replace one broken knife. He arrived an hour late, unapologetic. “I can’t keep the phone number of every service call I have,” was his non-excuse.

Sorry, but you can. In the age of mobile everything and constant connectivity and 8 GB of storage attached to your pen, you most certainly can. You could even when phones were in booths and storage was something that required a shed. It’s a minimum expectation of service.

Service, as everyone knows, is an extension of a previous sale and a preparation for a future sale. It’s the sale between sales, in other words.

The cable company didn’t lose a sale by not showing up. We’ll likely do business with the cable company for as long as its business model holds, which ought to be about a year.

The knife salesman? He’s not coming back. His products are staying, but his chances of a future sale went away. And with word-of-mouth reviews capable at the touch of a button of being spread to infinity and beyond, his chances of many future sales are in jeopardy.

Of the two faux pas, the knife salesman’s mistakes are the most egregious. He lives in a business world of door-to-door sales. Every time he steps into a house or makes an appointment to step into a house, he is engaging a client. He is both servicing and selling, on a turf that is not his own. The only thing he can do to level the playing field is provide a level of service capable of taking people’s familiar surroundings and making them unfamiliar, to use service to create enough imbalance or weakness to make a sale possible.

It’s been that way since the day of the Fuller Brush Man, and it hasn’t changed today. In fact, it’s more important today than ever, because it can now be monitored and measured as never before. We have more ways of defining and measuring good service, but do those definitions and measurements really draw a box around good service – or is truly good (or bad) service beyond our ability to measure?

Good service on one level exists on the Potter Stewart model – you know it when you see (or encounter) it. It may not be how quickly the phone was answered, or that the problem was rectified with one phone call, though both these numbers are eminently measurable and often thrown around as measures of superior service. It’s how the service experience made you feel.

The knife salesman/sharpener gave us no opportunity to feel good about anything. He sharpened the knives promptly without need for a followup visit (and actually, he played himself out of any future contact), but he tried to make us feel like his being an hour late was our responsibility.

Contrast this with another service experience. Two weeks ago my 11-year-old son broke the back window of our station wagon washing the car. No, he was not emulating his father by trying to wash a car with a hammer. He sprayed cold water on a hot window and the thing blew.

The station wagon is old and the tailgate had issues beyond having a blown window, so we decided to replace the tailgate with a tailgate from a junkyard, which has now rebranded itself as an automobile recycling facility. Whatever. Tailgates are cheap there.

There was, remarkably, a matching 15-year-old tailgate just down the street, but it was the wrong color and a trifle rusty. However, in Oshkosh, an hour and a half away, there was a nicer tailgate in the proper color.

I knew this by using an inventory search on the Web site of the mega-junkyard that owns the tailgate. The idea that a junkyard has indexed and computerized and made searchable its junk is sit-you-down-son amazing. I mean, it’s junk. What’s next? The hairs on your head? Ants? Grains of sand?

We called the toll-free number of the mega-junkyard and someone in their sales department – yeah, a junkyard has a sales department – said, “We’ll have it all ready for you. Just drive down to Oshkosh and pick it up. Two hundred twenty-five bucks.”

Cool. We hopped in the car and drive to Oshkosh – only to find that this junkyard, a wholly owned affiliate of the mega-junkyard, was a pull-it-yourself place. Bring your own tools, yank your own parts. I was in a polo shirt; my wife was in sandals. We were not prepared to pull a tailgate off a hulk.

We went to the office and, after a long wait, explained our conundrum to the lady working the desk. “Oh, they’re always forgetting to tell people that,” she said, and sympathized. There was no way we could get the part today, either, she said. We were unprepared to pull the part, and the part-puller had knocked off for the day. We’d have to come back.

At that point my wife offered her cash to circumvent the mega-junkyard people and sell directly to us. After a moment’s hesitation, the desk person quoted $175. My wife said, “Oh, no. We’ll pay you one-eighty.”

Did you get all that? We paid more than we were offered to get a part that we couldn’t even get that day.

In no way were we satisfied, on a superficial level. We had to drive an hour and a half home, then repeat the process on Monday, to pay above asking price. The problem wasn’t solved quickly, it wasn’t solved on first response, and the solution did not involve us getting something for nothing, or a significant discount. (While the tailgate did cost less, it didn’t cost as little as it could have.)

However, we were satisfied. We felt understood. We were united against a common enemy. The customer-company relationship had evolved into something infinitely more human. In fact, my wife wanted to give the desk clerk a hug.

Good service is not problem-solving. Good service is a communicative act that seeks common ground in order to elicit a positive human response.

Initial communication between strangers searches for common ground; once that common ground is found, substantive communication can proceed. The knife salesman/sharpener never got there, because he never tried. The junkyard desk clerk tried and got there, and profited as a result. How much time and money do service personnel waste by not first searching for the common ground before proceeding with the problem-solving?

There’s a simple moral to this story: Measure customer service all you want, but acknowledge that much of its power lies outside the realm of measurement. But the good news is, you can get there from here.