When suppliers talk to customers, watch out for the words they use and when they mention ethics and honesty. Don’t always trust them. When you cross the path of someone really honest, she does not need to tell you that honesty is one of her core values; you know it. When companies do care about their customers, they don’t need to say so; customers recognize the fact. Similarly, advertisements for “unparalleled customer service” should make you wary.
At KDS, we constantly work to be recognized as the leading company in our market sector, satisfying our customers more than everybody else. Of course, this goal is a challenge and I’m not pretending that we’ve cracked it completely. We need to be modest. And we always look for the ultimate recipe. There are hundreds of books written on this topic but I believe the key is: your problem is my problem. In other words, the advice we give our teams is: put yourself in the shoes of a customer raising an issue. Forget your own view of the world. If you were him, would you be satisfied with the solution you are bringing him? Would you think: “I’m working with a damn good company and I love the person who helped me”?
The key thing here is to forget your view of the world. The temptation in customer service can often be to make sure you have fulfilled your duty or commitments and lose sight of the ultimate issue. I would like to be concrete and to give you an example from the real world at KDS.
One of our customers had the following issue. The KDS system allows you to book trains in various countries. Since the system is fantastic (disclosure: I have a personal interest in KDS), it informs the user of exactly when the travel agency will create the train ticket and forward it to the user. Users started to complain because there was a discrepancy between the date displayed by the KDS system and the date that customers were really receiving their train tickets.
That issue was raised to KDS’s customer service and our answer at the time was: we don’t have a bug; that’s the way the system is configured; you just have to change the system configuration (ticketing delay) in order to reflect the real behaviour of your travel agency. Answer: correct. Service level agreement: respected. Duties: fulfilled. Customer service: bad. What should we have done (and what have people been instructed to do in the future)?
We should have said: we are going to call your travel agency to check what their rules are for distributing that train ticket. We are going to change the configuration accordingly. In addition, we are going to add, in our future versions of the product, a message explaining with more clarity what this date means, in what circumstances it could be different from the real date you receive your ticket and what you should do if a discrepancy occurs.
We should not have looked at the matter from a technical angle but asked: “If I’m using KDS and do not receive my train ticket when I’ve been instructed I would, what do I think? I worry.” We (KDS) know that the traveller is going to receive her train ticket perhaps a day later than announced, and certainly in good time to travel, but she does not know that.
We constantly train our teams to think that way. The only philosophy that works: your problem is my problem.
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