Service Failure by Jeff Toister

Author:Jeff Toister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AMACOM Books
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Attention Is in Short Supply

Getting Employees to Notice What Customers Really Need

My wife, Sally, and I flew into San Francisco for a getaway weekend and arrived at our hotel before check-in time. Hotels will often let you check in early if the room is ready, but the front desk agent informed us that our room wouldn’t be available for another forty-five minutes. We told her we’d relax in the lobby, and she assured us she’d let us know as soon as our room was ready. There were some overstuffed chairs directly in front of the check-in counter that looked comfortable, so we grabbed a seat and settled in for the wait.

I’m fascinated by observing people provide customer service, so I passed the time by watching the front desk agent and her coworkers. They seemed engaged in a never-ending flurry of activity. A steady stream of people approached the counter to check in or out, ask for directions, or make some other request. The phones rang frequently, and our front desk agent had to pause to answer. She also seemed to have quite a bit of computer work to do, since she filled the time between guests and phone calls by working away at the keyboard in front of her.

Sally and I started to get a little anxious as we neared the forty-five-minute mark, since it was a beautiful day and we were eager to go explore the city. We both started watching the front desk agent in anticipation that any minute now she’d wave us over and let us know our room was ready. She was such a whirlwind of activity that we assumed she was on top of it.

But forty-five minutes soon became an hour, with no sign from the hotel associate. We finally went back to the counter and asked for an update. She took a moment to look us up on her computer and said, “You can check in now, your room has been ready for half an hour.”

She had forgotten us! We were literally sitting in front of her for an hour, and she had forgotten we were there. Even worse, we could have checked in thirty minutes earlier. She didn’t even apologize.

Situations like this occur every day in customer service. From a customer’s perspective, it couldn’t be more obvious. The employee simply needs to pay more attention.

In this chapter, we’ll see that one of the challenges to providing outstanding customer service is that our attention is in increasingly short supply. In some cases, employees’ attention is divided among too many tasks, which can cause employees to miss opportunities to serve. At other times, employees can become so focused on one thing that they develop tunnel vision and again miss important cues from their customers. We’ll even discover a way that our brain naturally causes us to stop listening by jumping to conclusions. None of these obstacles are insurmountable, but companies need to provide customer service representatives with a lot of training and assistance to help them pay careful attention to their customers’ needs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.