If you grew up in the '80s, you probably remember the band 'The Fixx'. I'm not a huge fan but I did enjoy several of their songs. Probably my favorite is the song "Stand or Fall". My interpretation of the song, a war is occurring, morale is low,nothing is being done (by management) to improve the situation, and we are being encouraged to make our stand to declare our need for peace.So what does this have to do with support? Simple, are your support teams at "war"?
I've witnessed some very interesting finger-pointing in the last few weeks. What is crazy is I get the distinct feeling that the front line staff feels that if they don't "protect their turf" they will lose their "advantage". Some staff gave me the impression they always have to prove they are "right". The kicker was today when we had a meeting scheduled for 1 hour to review an issue. That turned into a 4 hour fact finding mission which brought out that our customer's issue was still not fixed after we told the customer 2 days earlier that we had a "resolution in place".
What concerns me the most is the impression of service we gave. Yes, we did service recovery. Yes, we know that we can do better. We say this way too often. Just like we say "We're sorry for the (fill in the blank)" way too often.
Why didn't we do it right the first time? How did we miss all the warnings signs? Why didn't someone(anyone?) call NO GO before we made the change? Are we afraid to make a "mistake"? If so, why? We cannot learn if we don't make mistakes. The key is that WE HAVE TO LEARN!!!!!
Service is a Stand or Fall issue. It's hard to train people to be service oriented (especially when they already think they have achieved the highest level of service they can). It always amazes me that true service thinking people always are looking for and working to achieve a new level of personal service. Service oriented people always provide exceptional service and rise to meet every service challenge. All I know is that my service isn't always what is needs to be and that I have the choice to improve. It doesn't matter how, it doesn't matter when, just commit to being the best service person you can be.
Service. Stand or Fall.
You have to be committed to giving 100% every time. If you don't do that, you fail. It's a sad reality. Let's face it, today's employees just don't have that commitment. I think a lot of people in the service industry have good intentions, but if they come upon any type of resistance from "the customer", they get defensive. Once that happens, a positive result is hard to achieve. Very interesting post Earl. Hope you enjoy my feelings.
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