High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service: Inspire Timeless Loyalty in the Demanding New World of Social Commerce by Micah Solomon

Author:Micah Solomon [Solomon, Micah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: AMACOM
Published: 2012-05-15T14:00:00+00:00

patting down jesse ventura

By January 2011, former Minnesota governor, Navy Seal, and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was fed up. Security alarms had been ringing for him in airports ever since his artificial hip replacement surgery in 2008, leading to full-body scans and pat-down body searches. When Ventura tired of this extra, intimate attention, he filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security, asking a federal judge to issue an immediate injunction against “warrantless and suspicionless” searches.

This seems an unfortunate and disconnected customer service scenario, regardless of where you come down on the constitutional merits of Ventura’s case (and, in fact, as we go to press, Ventura’s case has been thrown out for “lack of jurisdiction”). It seems clear, even self-evident, that former U.S. governors, even former-wrestler-former-governors with-oversized-personalities-and-weakness-for-conspiracy-theories, are unlikely to present a risk of terrorist activity. You could argue that back when Mr. Ventura was Minnesota’s highest elected official, he had the means at his disposal to wreak more havoc than he’s likely to accomplish today taking a workaday commercial flight.

It’s a simple matter of record that Ventura sets off metal detectors because of his titanium hip implant. So why’s he being forced to undergo full-body scans or pat-downs at the airport, two to three times a week, on the nonbasis that he’s “setting off the alarm,” which, among other downsides, would seem to be a colossal waste of time for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)?

One word: The people who work in the airports lack autonomy. Without autonomy, they not only can’t give fantastic customer service; they can’t even give reasonable baseline customer service. It’s against the rules.

Beating Little Kids at Chess

When I watch employees refusing to give way to customers in disputes over small charges, rushing shoppers out the door when it’s closing time, and engaging in a thousand other petty, by-the-book behaviors, it troubles me because it shows such an obvious failure of leadership, a management that has discouraged pro-customer autonomy and failed to help employees understand their purpose in the organization. What’s going on here is that someone has built or, as likely, allowed by default a company that functions the way you teach little kids to play chess.

You know how little kids are taught to play chess? You tell them a pawn’s worth a dollar, a knight three dollars, a rook, five dollars, a queen, eight bucks. This, up to a point, is smart, teaching kids what adult chess players instinctively know about the relative value of pieces. But the flaw in the system becomes quickly obvious and makes it embarrassingly easy to wallop kids at chess if this is all they know. A kid might gleefully proclaim in temporary triumph, “Heh, heh, heh, I’ve got twenty-five bucks worth of your pieces,” but you’ll be able to calmly and cold-bloodedly reply, “Well, yeah, that’s true, but … checkmate, buddy.”

It’s hard, when you’re taught to play chess this way, to understand the concept that the king has no definable value because it has infinite value. Likewise, until

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