Jeff Toister has written three customer service books; including his new book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service. Jeff has been recognized as a top customer service thought-leader by Global Gurus, ICMI, and COM100. More than 140,000 people on six continents have taken his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning (a.k.a. Lynda.com). His training videos include Customer Service Foundations and Leading a Customer-Centric Culture. In this episode, Jeff discusses his new book, how he got into the customer service field, why he firmly believes providing great customer service isn’t just a matter of using common sense, why customer service leaders shouldn’t be dismissive of angry customers, how customers sabotage the service they receive, a breakdown of the “Zone of Hospitality,” and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Jeff Toister’s Website
• Jeff Toister’s Books
• Smart Customer Service Conference
• Voice of Influence Podcast | Episode 81: How to Write with the Voice of Your Brand with Leslie O’Flahavan

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! 

So, if you’ve been listening to episodes in the last few weeks, you know that we are talking to experts in the area of customer service, in particular, because I’ll be speaking at Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29^th through May 1^st.  And we’re speaking with some of those other presenters for the conference and today is definitely going to be a treat.  If you want to know more about the Smart Customer Service Conference, you can go to voiceofinfluence.net where we will have links to that conference there.

Today, I have with me Jeff Toister.  Jeff Toister has written three customer service books, including his book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service that just came out a week ago from this airing of this podcast.  He has been recognized as a top customer service thought leader by Global Gurus, ICMI, and Comm100.  More than 140,000 people on six continents have taken his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning Lynda.com and Jeff’s training videos include Customer Service Foundations and Leading a Customer-Centric Culture.

Andrea:  Jeff, it’s great to have you with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Jeff Toister:  Oh, Andrea, thank you so much for having me and I have to commend you, it’s fantastic that you’re doing these podcast sessions in the lead up to the Smart Customer Service Conference.  So I’m really looking forward to see you in person at the conference but, of course, I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Andrea:  Yeah.  This has been really fun.  It’s been fun to connect with people and I think that what’s interesting is that everybody has a little bit different perspective and a little bit different of expertise to bring to the table and that’s always exciting to really hear that.  And I know that you just came out with your book; can you tell us a little bit about your new book?

Jeff Toister:  Sure.  Well, it’s called Getting Service Right as you said, and the promise behind that is just that all of us have experienced poor customer service and if you were customer service leadership, you’ve seen your employees deliver poor service.  And most of the time their reaction is “It’s so obvious what they should have done, I can’t believe they didn’t do it the right way.” And what the book tackles are hidden, counterintuitive, sometimes unusual obstacles that get in the way.  And they’re all based upon real experiences.  I’ve done the research so you don’t have to but then I’ve also found solutions that actually work.  And so it’s kind of a fun look at how hard it really is to serve customers but how we can learn to be much, much better.

Andrea:  What was the kind of the origin story of Jeff Toister?  Were you always interested in customer service?  What got you into this field?

Jeff Toister:  Little did I know that I would start this book or get interested in customer service or training, and really I have a background as a customer service trainer.  The very first customer I’ve ever served, my very first job, it was a service failure and has spurred me forward. 

So what happened was, I was working in a retail store.  I’m in high school, so I’m nervous.  I don’t have a lot of experience and the person who was supposed to be training be gave me about 15 minutes of orientation and said “Well, I’m going on break, here’s the key to the dressing room, good luck!” And I was terrified and so I’m secretly hoping no one comes and talks to me until she comes back from break.  But of course, you know, my worst fear is a customer who approaches me and he was definitely had this kind of tension, like he was looking for something and he needed help.  So he comes right up to me and says “Do you carry Dockers?” 

And I didn’t know and now you know and I know and I’m sure your listeners know, if you don’t know the answers to a question, go ask someone who does. But tell that to a 16-year-old kid who’s nervous and barely knows what he’s doing.  I couldn’t stop my mouth from saying what my brain was thinking, which is I don’t know.  That’s actually a skill to stop your mouth from saying everything what’s going on in your brain.  That’s a skill you learn overtime.  And at 16, I hadn’t learned that yet, so I said very nervously, “I don’t know,” and I didn’t get a second chance.  He got angry “Kids these days,” stormed out of the store. 

I remember feeling in that moment like an idiot.  I knew I said the wrong thing.  It was my inexperienced that didn’t prevent me from doing the right thing. And so I wanted to get better and never feel that way again but I also realized that it was certainly my fault.  I needed to take responsibility.  I was also not set up for success.  The person who should have been training me didn’t put me in a position where I could answer that question with confidence.  So that’s always fascinated me how can we set people up for success, and in particular, in the customer service world.

Andrea:  It makes a difference for the company but it makes a difference for that person too.  I’m sure that as a 16 year old, you were feeling like, who am I, what am I doing and that sort of thing when it came to that difficult conversation that ended up happening.

Jeff Toister:  Well, of course, and you know, most of us, I’m sure you had that new job feeling.  I think we’ve all had that feeling at once whether it goes well or it doesn’t go well.  You have a certain level of nervousness and then to have a failure almost immediately on top of that.  You know, failure can be a powerful learning experience but it can also be a signal to a lot of us that “I made a bad decision.  I don’t even know why I’m working here.”  And often that happens to employees.  They have such a horrible first experience at first introduction that you lose their commitment almost instantly when they start a job.

Andrea:  Absolutely.  Yeah and then it has ripple effects for sure.  So I’m curious why did you end up writing this particular book?  I know that you’ve written a couple of other ones as well.  What led you to this one in particular?

Jeff Toister:  I think it’s the notion that customer service is easy.  I’ve heard so many people, even leaders talk about it in terms of common sense.  I wanted to debunk that.  I’m very curious about kind of the why behind how people operate.  So I would see somebody, you know, do something and I’d wonder why they did it, you know, whether it was good or bad performance. 

And I started kind of digging into research and the more I dug, the more I found. So as an example, one thing that’s always frustrated me as a customer service trainer is how dismissive many leaders are about angry customers.  And they’ll tell an employee, “Just don’t take it personally.”  I never like that.  I didn’t think that was very helpful advice.  So the more I looked into it, the more I realized, you know, we all have this instinct called the fight or flight instinct where when we’re confronted with an angry person, our instinct is either to fight them, you know hopefully not physically, but we argue with them perhaps or flee.  And that’s the flight part, in other words, to get away.  Yet, in customer service, we’re saying, you can’t argue with them and you also can’t run away, you have to smile and take it.

So our instinct as a human being goes against the very fabric of what you’re supposed to do in customer service.  And when I realized that I said “That’s something, right?  We need to help employees deal with this.”  And then if you look at the leaders, I discovered really fascinating study that it’s easier for our customer service leader to delegate something unpleasant to an employee than it is for them to do it themselves.

In other words, that customer service leader who is dismissive and says, don’t take it personally, they’re probably insulating themselves from those same angry customers.  So it’s easy for them to give that flippant advice because they don’t have to worry about taking it personally.  And those types of things over and over I kept finding that there are ways around these repeated service failures, we just need to find them.  And ultimately, that all the research became a book.

Andrea:  So is there some sort of purpose then that’s driving you to solve these problems, to dig into these questions and these things that you’re saying?  Why do you care?  Why did you go into this?

Jeff Toister:  Well, I think at a basic level.  I don’t want anybody to feel like I felt when I was that 16 year old.  But what I’m fascinated by is really helping people and teams unlock their hidden potential.  And this is very similar, I think, to what you do.  So I would call myself a customer service trainer, it was really what I started doing.  But there’s so much more than formal training.  There’s often different obstacles that are in the way that have nothing to do with training.  And to me, it’s both fascinating to figure out what the obstacles are but then immensely rewarding to help an individual or to help a team figure out a way to overcome the obstacle.

And sometimes it’s surprising.  And an example, a small company years ago hired me to do customer service training because the CEO felt that employees were being rude.  So the natural solution they jumped to is, let’s do a class to teach to teach people to not be rude.  It turns out most of us know how to be polite.  It’s situational, so what’s causing the rudeness.  And I spent 15 minutes with the team and it’s not that I’m some sort of wizard, it’s just I asked questions where the leaders in that organization did not. And what I learned was that, at certain times of day, certain days of the week, they were under staffed and they would have people waiting on the phone for 30 minutes.  Well, that creates this kind of tension, right?  “I’m nervous about how many people are on hold so I naturally get abrupt with the person I’m talking to because I’m trying to get them off the phone.  I’m anticipating the next person is going to be angry at me for keeping them waiting.”  And so that was really the root cause.

And for this company, fortunately, the solution was pretty easy.  They just needed to change their schedule to better match demand.  Sometimes they had too few people, but other times they had too many people.  And so without adding staff, they just needed to redistribute their staff throughout their week to better match when those people were actually going to be calling.  And that small adjustment was enough to dramatically change the perception of rudeness with no training required.  And so to me that is so much fun, but the reward is this great performance where before those employees were pretty frustrated with their jobs.

Andrea:  Hmm, I love that because I’ve noticed that with individuals, with teams that sometimes you think that something is an internal problem like I have a problem, there’s something that I’m doing wrong.  There’s something that I don’t know psychologically that’s wrong or whatever.  But when it turns out, it’s a piece of overwhelm or stress that could so easily be taken care of with a slight tweak like you’re talking about.  That’s fantastic!

Jeff Toister:  I guess the only problem is I end up talking myself out of doing the training class, but that’s OK.  I’ve learned to accept that.  I’d rather have my client be successful than to sell them to the cookie-cutter solution.

Andrea:  Right.  I’m sure that the training would still be beneficial though.  You seem to be really connected to why things matter and motives and things like that.  Have you found that values play a pretty important role when making customer related business decisions?

Jeff Toister:  Values are tricky and I’ll tell you why.  You know, almost every company has set of values.  The most common value, there was a study, and I apologized because it’s at the top of my head and I can’t remember who did the study.  It’s a few years old, but they looked at the most common corporate values, and the number one value was integrity.  And what’s interesting about that is Enron listed integrity as one of its core values. 

And you may know the story and your listeners may know the story, it’s one of the hugest scandals involving fraud in the history of US. So there’s a huge disconnect between stated values in what we say are our corporate values and what are values actually are. 

Values are actually are agreed upon norms that influence your behavior and thinking and it’s great if they’re explicitly defined.  But what really tell us what the true values are are the behaviors and how people act, how people communicate, and how people treat each other. And so in a lot of our organizations, I mean every organization, has values.  The question is whether or not their actual values match what the value statements are on the company website.  And I’ll give you an example from my own client work. 

A mid-sized credit union hired me to work with them to understand how well their values that they communicated to the entire organization and how well people are living them. And it was a fascinating project because almost everybody in the organization could recite.  There were five core values.  They could all recite them.  So they’ve done a fantastic job of that.  Where they struggled was there was universal disagreement as to what behaviors constituted a values match.  And even on the executive team, they could not agree as to what living the values actually looked like and not to coincidentally one of their values was integrity.

Andrea:  Sorry, it took me just a second understanding what you meant by that.  That was pretty good.

Jeff Toister:  It’s alright.  It was an Enron call back, right?

Andrea:  Yes.

Jeff Toister:  Everybody’s got integrity as a value.  It doesn’t mean that your…

Andrea:  Right.  That was good.  Yeah, I think that there can be such a huge disconnect but when those things are connected, it does seem to make a difference.

Jeff Toister:  It’s huge because then you can explicitly say, this is how we operate and you can share that with your employees and then they’ll know exactly what behaviors are appropriate and rewarded and what behaviors are frowned upon.

Andrea:  So I’d like to get into your book a little bit if you don’t mind.  There are few different things that came up for me that I’d like to ask you about and one of those really stood out to me.  You say that customers can sabotage the service that they receive, what does that mean?

Jeff Toister:  I’ll start with the research.  I always like to start with the research.

Andrea:  Great!

Jeff Toister:  Two things; one is customer service expert named John Goodman who has done a lot of research on customer service data and the sources of service failure.  In his research uncovered that about 20 percent of service failures are caused by the employees, about 60 percent, this is a rough-cut, are caused by poor product service or processes, so out of the employees’ hands, and about 20 percent caused by customer errors. 

And some of those errors are accidental “I’m confused by the instructions.”  “I don’t know how to operate this product,” and some are delivered. There’s this air of certainty that customer sometimes possessed that they’re doing it right even when they’re doing it wrong, which leads to something else that’s fascinated me on this notion that we have that the customer is always right.  And I think a lot of people believe that. 

And I in fact, I want to do a research, who first said this?  Like I was kind of angry, I wanted to track them down and maybe send them like a box of glitters or something.  I’m just not happy with this person and come to find out no one first said it.  What has happened is over the years, we’ve taken quotes and there are several potential candidates for the origin, but we’ve taken quotes and twisted them to mean something different. An example, one possible origin is Cesar Ritz, you know, the Ritz Carlton Hotels.  He allegedly said, from the research I found, he said “The customer is never wrong.”  And the context of that is not that customers don’t make mistakes, they do.  It’s just that we don’t argue with customers.  We try to help them be right. 

You can imagine if we’re both on the same side that can work beautifully.  But if there’s an insistence on the customer point of view that “No matter what I’ve done, I’m right and you have to figure out how to fix it,” that’s doesn’t lead itself naturally to great service outcomes. And unfortunately a lot of customers have that attitude and that leads them to, you know, withhold key information or dig their heels in and refuse to follow a sensible solution, you know, get unreasonably angry. 

There’s even something I lovingly call “the rule of three,” which is customer psychologically will exaggerate how bad things are sometimes by a factor of three just to make it feel like it’s actually bad.  You know, if I waited five minutes, I’m not going to get any of my friends to cry with me about that.  But if I say, I waited 15 minutes, maybe.  Or you know if the person was stern with me that won’t engender sympathy, but if they cussed me out, uh, well that was terrible.  So customer will often exaggerate about how bad things are as well.

Andrea:  Really, why do you think that they do that?

Jeff Toister:  I think it goes back to the customer is always right.  If you created this construct that I am right, you are wrong, the psychological defenses come up and they start protecting our ego by doubling down on “No, it’s your fault and you have to fix it, I’m the customer.”

Andrea:  You know, that’s interesting and I’m going to take this to an interesting, a different place for just a second.  But I’m a part of an initiative where were working on bringing more positive communication about our community to social media in conversations and things like this.  And one of the things that we’re noticing is that there are a lot of people who do this, who kind of exaggerate in those small groups. 

You know, I’ve got a group around me and maybe I’m getting my hair done and I start talking and I start making a little bit of exaggeration and I start placing the blame on other folks.  It’s almost like customer service.  It’s almost like the people of a community even looking at their town as a company that they’re not being served by but in a sense almost, I’m having an a-ha moment so, you know, forgive me.  But it feels like kind of what you’re saying, does that sound similar to you?

Jeff Toister:  It does, and part of it is I think positive fuels better.  We’re naturally wired to be more heavily influenced by the negative.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Jeff Toister:  So in a service situation, companies often talk about wowing the customer.  What we should really work hard to do is avoid angering the customer which is equally challenging.  But the impact of a wow versus the impact of a service failure, that service failure is far more impactful because negative things stand out more.  That’s why we see more negative new stories. 

That’s why, you know, we hear more people complaining rather than saying, that was really good.  It’s just how we’re wired. And I’ve learned to stop feeling bad about us being human and just try to better understand it, like in a customer service context knowing that people are naturally wired to think about things in more of the negative.  I’ve spend more time there and I think companies spend more time trying to prevent things from failing. 

And the funny thing about that is you can be perceived as brilliant by your customers if you’re just consistently good.  You know, forget the wow stuff.  That’s really tough to do and you don’t get a chance to do it every day.  Just be consistently good, make what people’s lives a little bit easier and somehow that stands out from the crowd.

Andrea:  OK, what is the zone of hospitality?

Jeff Toister:  The zone of hospitality is kind of a mindset thinking that anybody around me and this generally works, I think more so in face-to-face situation, so retail, restaurant, hospital, etc.  Anybody around me, I’m creating a zone of hospitality and I’m going to make them feel welcome and try to help them.  This can be a challenge because of the way people are led, so let’s use a retail example.  In retail, a lot of associates on the retail sales floor have customer service responsibilities but they also have kind of task oriented responsibilities, like rearrange a display or fold all of those jeans.

Well, at the end of the day, it’s easier for the manager to be able tell if the display or the task was completed versus whether or not that employee was servicing customers at a very high level.  So the default usually coming from the leaders is to focus on the task first rather than service first.  And so zone of hospitality is just kind of a mindset that says, I’m going to create a zone of hospitality around me regardless of whether or not this person fits kind of my job or my department. 

I’m going to help them out. I worked with a client that was on a college campus and they had people in a variety of different roles and it just wasn’t their job say to help a student find a classroom.  But the zone of hospitality says, I see someone with that lost look on their face wandering through my area near to me.  As a human, I can tell they have a need and so I’m going to approach them in a friendly manner and offer them assistance.  So that mindset says, despite it not being the task oriented part of my job, I’m still creating this zone to make them feel welcome and find a way to help them.

Andrea:  Yes, zone is so important.  You talked also about viewing our roles from the customer’s perspective and that there’s sometimes a difference or a dissonance between the way that we see or what we see our job to be and what they see our job to be.  Is this similar to what you’re just talking about?  Does that coincide with that?

Jeff Toister:  It does.  I’d say it’s little parallel.  The example there is have you ever had computer problems where you needed to contact support or IT internally?

Andrea:  Of course.

Jeff Toister:  Well all have, right?  So think about it and that could be a perfect example.  When you’re having computer problems, your need is to get back to work, to do whatever it is that you were doing.  It’s very natural for the IT support person to view your need in terms of the language you use.  My computer is not working, so it just naturally, they’ll focus on the task fixing your computer and there becomes a disconnect because you really need to get back to work.  You don’t care how they do that, and they’re looking at the kind of more technical aspect of providing solutions.  But the most technical and easiest solution might not be the best way to get you back to work. And so that requires kind of reframing things from the customer’s point of view saying “Well, how do I get you back to work?” 

An example, I was once hosting a webinar and I needed support about 20 minutes before the webinar started and I kind of panicked and nervous because I have all these people, you know, it’s a client that’s paying me to host this webinar and now things aren’t working.  And I’ll never forget the technical support walked me through the problem, but she was also very sensitive to my anxiety because I explained what was happening.  And she did something I’ll never forget she said, “I’m gonna stay on the line with you until your webinar starts just to make sure everything is working properly.” Now, she was focused on a task. 

She would say, “Hey, it’s working, I’m onto the next thing.”  If her job was evaluated based upon efficiency, that would be exactly the behavior that she should have chosen.  But in that moment, I was lucky enough to have someone who’s realizing that the real need here was to give me some relief that my webinar was going to go off without a hitch.  And by staying with me just a little bit longer, I had so much more confidence and peace of mind.  Then if she had simply fixed the problem, I still would have been really nervous about it.

Andrea:  I love that.  Almost like a safety blanket.

Jeff Toister:  That’s very true.

Andrea:  That’s fantastic!  So do you think that there’s pretty clear line or is it kind of difficult for companies to decide when customer service should be more based on, you know, completing the task and efficiency versus being able to provide that extra level of emotional support as well that that you’re just talking about?

Jeff Toister:  This is where it gets a little counterintuitive for leaders if we look at how things are measured.  We use contact centers an example because there are so many things that are measured.  I know how long an agent spends on a phone call and I know how long they spend on their average call and I know how much that costs me.  That’s very tangible.  So the default, because it’s easy to measure that and I’m trying to be efficient and reduce costs, the default is to measure handle time or how many emails per hour you can respond or how many chats you can handle at one time and clear out in your shift.

The challenge with that, of course, is when you put someone on a clock like that; their natural inclination is to speed through things.  I had one agent say, “You know I get a lot of really angry customers but I only have six minutes to solve their problem.  I don’t have time to make them feel good.  I just have time to tell them what to do.”  It’s counterintuitive but if you were to focus agents on solving the issue completely and fully but efficiently and take the clock away from them so don’t put it in front of them. 

As a leader, may be you still measure but don’t put it in front of the agent. When I talked to companies who have done this, it was really interesting.  What happens is they spend just a little bit more time making sure that the person doesn’t have to call back.  And if you were to measure that when people call back, now that problem becomes a lot more expensive because they had to contact you twice, but that’s just harder to measure. The other thing that’s counterintuitive when you’ve taken the clock away from the agent and say, “Just focus on getting the customer through this as quickly as you can, but in a way that they’re delighted about.” 

The average time it takes to resolve a problem either remains the same or goes down slightly.  And I hope I’m not getting too much in the weeds here but what happens is when agents know that they’re on the clock, they’ll speed things up. But here’s the other thing that I think a lot of leaders don’t realize it’s when agents think that they have extra time, because it was a short problem, it was easier to solve, they slow things down.  So they work, always work towards the standard rather than just getting the customers through as efficiently and fully as they possibly can.

Andrea:  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.  Jeff, this has been a great, great conversation.  I hate to stop now but we need to because of time.  So can you tell us a little bit about your session?  I know that you’re presenting with someone at Smart Customer Service, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jeff Toister:   I am so lucky because I am presenting with my good friend but also the, in my opinion, customer service writing guru, Leslie O’Flahaven.  And our session is How to Write Like a Human in the Age of Speed.  So we’re combining our expertise.  I’ll share research I’ve done on people’s expectation for response time, particularly email, and how those expectations influences sometimes to make mistakes.  And Leslie is such a fantastic writing coach.  She is going to send us through some very interactive exercises on how to better understand our customers and write better but also faster.  So it’s going to be a very interactive session and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Andrea:  That’s great!  And if you the listeners are looking to hear my conversation with Leslie, it’s episode 81, How to Write with the Voice of your Brand.  So I’m glad that I was able to have this conversation with you and Leslie in different times and I look forward to connecting with you in D.C.

Jeff Toister:  It’s going to be a lot of fun and thanks for doing this.  This is such a cool idea.

Andrea:  Alright.