GIVE UP THE NEED TO BE RIGHT
MARTIN GRUNSTEIN Most in demand speaker on customer service
The need to be right is a basic psychological human need and it is the catalyst for destruction of relationships, both personal and business. How innate is it? See whether you relate to this as a parent. You catch your toddler drawing with crayons on the wall. They have the crayons in their hand and a guilty smile on their face. You say to your little angel “Who did that?” and what does your child reply? “Not me, mummy!” I have given this scenario to audiences at many conferences and the response is almost universal that they can relate to the above example. Why? Because our need to be right, or more correctly, our need not to be proved wrong, is fundamental and psychologists say that the younger your child is when he/she starts to lie, the more intelligent he/she is. How does that apply to customer service? Very directly. Say, you are the owner of a restaurant and a customer says the food is terrible. Your first instinct as a human being is to defend yourself from the heinous accusation. You may tell the customer that the chef is world renowned or that you have won awards for your food AND THAT IS THE WRONG THING TO DO and is more likely to lead to you losing that customer than the quality of the food itself. Our need to prove ourselves right at the expense of the customer is the single major obstacle to becoming a business with a reputation for outstanding customer service. The adage “the customer is always right” is definitely not true. Many times the customer is wrong and sometimes they are a pain in the neck. But the customer must walk away THINKING they are right if you want them to come back. And if there is a complaint, the customer must be able to save face as well as have the complaint resolved if they are to be a customer again in future. When customers are spending their money in any situation, fundamental to the relationship is that their ego is preserved during the experience by everyone they come in contact with. If we stick with the restaurant theme, my wife and I were out at a restaurant with another couple and the waiter was taking our drinks order. I ordered a Coke and the waiter said they didn’t have Coke, they had Pepsi. I said that’s fine. I then said to my friends that I remember from my old marketing days that Pepsi used to beat Coke in blind product tests and most people couldn’t tell the difference anyway. The waiter corrected me. He said that he had also studied marketing and the recent evidence is that Coke beats Pepsi and people CAN tell the difference. I wanted to tell the waiter to rack off!!!!! It’s not his job to correct my errors. But his need to be right was greater than his need to have a satisfied customer. We laughed about the incident at the table but I was embarrassed and my wife and I have never returned to the restaurant and I have told many people about the experience and the restaurant in question. The best story I heard of a customer being humiliated by a service professional came when I was doing work in the golf club industry. One of the lady members complained that she was a vegan and there wasn’t sufficient variety in the club’s menu to keep her happy and she suggested that the club change its menu to accommodate her. The staff member (who was having a bad day – but that shouldn’t be the customer’s problem) told her “There’s plenty of grass out there. Why don’t you just have a munch on some of it while you are playing?” Am I saying that we need to suppress a basic human need to be right to be providers of good customer service? Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying! So what do we replace our first instinct of defence and justification with when we receive a complaint or hear something we don’t agree with? EMPATHY! When you are kept waiting by a dentist or an accountant or anyone in business for that matter, the first thing they should say is “I am terribly sorry for keeping you waiting. I appreciate your time is valuable”. AND VALIDATION! The last few weeks of my father’s life were very traumatic for me. I was at the hospital every day and I was becoming quite a pain in the neck to the staff when I couldn’t get answers to questions or talk to his doctor when I needed to. One day his doctor took me aside one day and said “I need to speak to you”. I thought he was going to reprimand me for my poor behaviour but he did exactly the opposite. He said “I appreciate your frustration but we are doing everything we can for your father. I also want to tell you that you are a very good son. You are here every day and many other patients don’t have a loved one who cares for them like you. I hope when my time comes, my son
June 2018 www.tha.asn.au
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