How do you stop customers telling untruths?

A perennial question for managers is one of relativities. How much do you spend on training compared to fit-outs, rent, or inventory control?

These are questions of data as much as strategy.

An airline employee with poor knowledge and a bad attitude may ruin a customer’s entire experience to the point where they not only tell 10 people, but they exaggerate the story and tell untruths.

Imagine an airline customer is running late for a flight, only to find a problem with the booking. The check-in clerk cannot fix the problem and has a poor attitude, thus souring the whole experience. The flight is delayed 5 minutes, the frequent flyer is seated in a middle seat towards the back, and their luggage is the last off the carousel. The story is relayed as follows: “They almost caused me to miss my flight,,. I was 15 minutes late… they made me sit at the back.. my baggage was almost lost”. In fact the story eventually gets shortened to the point where they say ‘the airline can’t get anything right!’ Let’s face it, some customers embellish and turn word-of-mouth marketing into an awful virus.

An employee may pass all your internal training tests, but does their knowledge and attitude translate to the front line when they are under pressure? What do you do?
Let the data talk.

1. Do not act too quickly. Anecdotal evidence is deceiving. Regular measurement will tell you if the event is systemic or a one-off.

2. Collect the service importance measurements for your customers. How important is service and knowledge? Do you know how much your customers value Service over Presentation?

3. Provide supervisors with tools to identify and manage behaviour. Do your supervisors know exactly what to do if staff attitude is waning or staff lack knowledge? Do they ‘know’ it’s waning?

4. Review your proportional spend. How much do you proportionally spend on your business drivers and how does that map against what your customer wants? This is not to say they should be in the same proportion, but understand the relativities.

5. You get the behaviour you measure. Are you still measuring throughput rather than service? Measure speed and you get speed, measure service to improve service.

In my travels around the country I have seen too many people base their decisions on gut feel. Let the data do the talking.