Customer Service Reader

Customer Service and the Pursuit of Happiness

Does happiness at work matter? Most of your life is spent going to work, being at work, going from work, thinking about work, and talking about work after work. If you work in customer service, and are not happy with your job, you have the wrong job. You should find the calling that makes you happy. When you are happy at work, you’ll never have to work another day.

Most people don’t expect to find happiness, working a customer service job. But customer service, by its very nature, presents unique opportunities for the pursuit of happiness, not only for individuals, but for society as a whole.

Researchers in the field of Subjective Well-being (happiness) have found that there are certain characteristics that happy people have in common. Happy people:

• Have self-control
• Are grateful
• Have good social relationships, supportive friends and family
• Have an adequate income
• Have respectable jobs, and
• Have a philosophy that provides meaning to their lives.

Using this framework, can we, as providers, find happiness through customer service?

Self-control

The consistent practice of outstanding customer service behaviors requires an extraordinary amount of self-control. It starts with the realization that YOU are in control.

• You choose your attitude
• You choose your response
• You choose to set aside your personal problems
• You choose to give others a better day

When we take control, we refuse to be victims of circumstance, or of our own personal weaknesses. We take charge of our lives and of the situations that we face. This is a principal requirement of a life in service and, as it turns out, a principal requirement for a happy life.

Gratitude

"Thank you" is perhaps that the second most important customer service phrase. We use it (or ought to use it) dozens of times a day (thank you for calling, thank you for bringing that to my attention, thank-you-come-again). When we use these phrases authentically - i.e. when we mean what we say - we develop a habit of thankfulness. In Akumal III, Dr Bob Emmons reported research which showed that "people high in gratitude are more satisfied with life, have more vitality, more happiness, more optimism, hope, positive affect, lower psychological symptoms, more prosocial behaviors, and are higher on empathy".

Good social relationships

When you consistently practice customer service values and skills, such as kindness, listening, empathy, gratitude, responsibility, and persuasion, you develop habits that will stay with you for the rest of your life, and that can be applied to all other aspects of your life. You'll be able to make friends more easily, and will be better skilled at strengthening your relationships with your friends and family. They in turn will tend to reciprocate. People who are happy have strong relationships with friends and family. This is both a characteristic of happy people, and a consequence of their behavior.

Adequate income

There is a premium in the labor market for outstanding customer service providers. More important, we have the opportunity to constantly increase both our short-term and long-term income by applying our customer service skills. As Henry Ford once said, one who is “absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”

Respectable jobs

This has two components. There’s the respect that you get for how you do your job, and there’s the respect you get for having that job. It’s not easy to provide outstanding customer service to every customer, on every transaction, every minute of the day. If you can do that, that’s something you can truly be proud of, and it’s certainly deserving of respect. Chances are you already stand out, and are duly rewarded.

The second component, respect for the job itself, depends less on the individual, and more on the team as a whole. When everyone in your organization or location provides outstanding service, people tend to talk about you, and you're likely to be known and respected for the service that you provide. It's a source of pride just to be part of such a team. The hard part is that it does depend on everyone. All it takes is one bad player to ruin the whole game.

A philosophy that provides meaning to their lives

The principles at the root of outstanding customer service are simple enough to say:

• Our lives have more meaning when we serve others
• Customer service is, first and foremost, a form of service
• To serve each other and each customer is to serve humanity

As customer service providers, we touch millions of people each year. Each contact is an opportunity to make each life we touch a little better each day. And when we make people happy, they tend to pay it forward. Through the phenomenon psychologists call the “emotional contagion”, we can be carriers of an epidemic of kindness. We can be weapons of mass construction.

I'll end with some thoughts from some people who are a lot smarter than me:

Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. Martin Luther King Jr

Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service. Leo Tolstoy

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive. Only a life lived for others is a life worth living. Albert Einstein

Every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large. Mohandas  K Gandhi

See also: Q&A with Dr Ed Diener

The Solution

An organization’s success at the consistent delivery of outstanding service is merely the cumulative result of the contribution of each of its members. Outstanding service is just the consequence of each individual’s choice to be great at service. That’s our decision, as individual providers, to make. It’s our responsibility. And it’s our gain.

Notes from Chapter 3, The 8th Habit, Stephen Covey

Most of the great cultural shifts started with the choice of one person. Sometimes it was the formal leader; most of the time, it was not.

These agents of change first changed themselves, then inspired and lifted others. They possessed an anchored sense of identity, discovered their strengths and talents, and used them to produce results.

• People like this don’t get sucked in or pulled down by all the negative, demoralizing, insulting forces in the organization
• Their organizations are no better than most organizations
• All organizations are, to some degree, a mess
• Don’t wait for your boss or organization to change
• Be an island of excellence in a sea of mediocrity
• Be contagious
• Learn your true nature and gifts
• Use them to develop a vision of great things you want to accomplish
• Understand the needs and opportunities around you, and meet them
• Make a difference
• Find and use your voice
• Serve and inspire others
• Inspire others to find their voice
• All of us can decide to leave behind a life of mediocrity, and to live a life of greatness
• We all have the power to decide to live a great life
• No matter how long we’ve walked life’s pathway to mediocrity, we can always choose to switch paths

The employee experience

Notes from Customer Experience Management, Bernd Schmitt

In most companies, employees do not care about their jobs. A Gallup survey found that only 25% of employees are “actively engaged”. 75% are just muddling through. University of Michigan’s David Ulrich observes that “job depression” is on the rise.

• Disengaged and depressed employees are not likely to deliver a great experience to customers.
• To turn that around, you must engage the heart and soul of every employee. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago found that employees want to experience work as “flow” – when they become so involved in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. Flow is about optimal experiences and enjoyment in life, and the ultimate goal is “turning all life into a unified flow experience”. When that happens, work does not feel like work, and the separation of work and leisure becomes meaningless. Work and leisure become one.

You can make that happen by treating employees as customers, and applying the principles of Customer Experience Management.

1. Find out what they want, learn about their experiential world.
2. Ask them what they would change.
3. Instead of imposing a regime, let them help develop their new work environment.
4. Get them really involved in the brand. Run workshops and discuss what it means to them. Let them suggest how they can live the brand in their work and in their personal lives.
5. Examine the employee interface. How can you improve contacts and interactions?
6. Seek their input about innovation, include them in developing innovations.

If you pay attention to your employees experiences, you will be rewarded with a happier, more productive, more proactive workforce. Utopia? Yes, sadly many companies today still operate according to a command-and-control system. Strategy is developed at the top and disseminated to the front lines in an environment of fear. This experience-destroying, military model of the organization fails to recognize the innovative and value-creating forces that a positive employee experience can unleash.

Zaltman on creativity

Notes from How Customers Think, Gerald Zaltman

80% of all new products or services fail within six months, or fall significantly short of forecasted profits. The reasons boil down to a failure to understand how customers think, and how we think about how customers think. Our mental doors are stuck, and we have to pry them open.

To understand our customers, we have first to acknowledge that they do not necessarily understand themselves.

Their motivations are often beneath the surface; 95% of decision-making goes on subconsciously.

We should also understand and develop our own habits of mind. These habits help us be more creative about how we discover what customers want, and what to do about them.

Restlessness. We should make our own work out of date, and view conclusions as beginnings, rather than endings. Ask “what makes me restless,” and make sure you have plenty of whatever it is that does.

An appreciation of the irregular, and an eye for the odd. Welcome the unexpected. How can I better detect anomalies? How can I create anomalies?

Reasoned but visceral stubbornness. Have cool passion. Be more committed to the process of creating ideas, than to the ideas themselves. Seek knowledge from other domains. Maintain the courage of your convictions. Tolerate those who disagree. What foreign fields are most interesting, enjoyable, and important to visit?

Wide peripheral vision. Ask generic questions. Avoid premature dismissal. What makes me curious and nosy? What tempts me to break things that work?

See also:
Lou Carbone, What makes customers tick

Good people make good service. Good service makes good people.

Listed below are competencies extracted from the Emotional Competence Framework of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. They are the competencies that matter most to the success of customer service providers. Conversely, when we practice service - whether on customers, family members, colleagues, or communities - we become better at these competencies. We become better people.

Outstanding customer service providers:

• Realize the links between their feelings and what they think, do, and say
• Have a guiding awareness of their values and goals
• Are reflective, learning from experience
• Are open to candid feedback, new perspectives, continuous learning, and self-development
• Are able to show a sense of humor and perspective about themselves
• Can voice views that are unpopular and go out on a limb for what is right
• Are decisive, able to make sound decisions despite uncertainties and pressures
• Manage their impulsive feelings and distressing emotions well
• Stay composed, positive, and unflappable even in trying moments
• Think clearly and stay focused under pressure
• Act ethically and are above reproach
• Build trust through their reliability and authenticity
• Admit their own mistakes
• Meet commitments and keep promises
• Hold themselves accountable for meeting their objectives
• Are organized and careful in their work
• Smoothly handle multiple demands, shifting priorities, and rapid change
• Adapt their responses and tactics to fit fluid circumstances
• Seek out fresh ideas from a wide variety of sources
• Entertain original solutions to problems
• Generate new ideas
• Are results-oriented, with a high drive to meet their objectives and standards
• Set challenging goals and take calculated risks
• Pursue information to reduce uncertainty and find ways to do better
• Learn how to improve their performance
• Readily make personal or group sacrifices to meet a larger organizational goal
• Find a sense of purpose in the larger mission
• Pursue goals beyond what’s required or expected of them
• Cut through red tape and bend the rules when necessary to get the job done
• Persist in seeking goals despite obstacles and setbacks
• Are attentive to emotional cues and listen well
• Show sensitivity and understand others’ perspectives
• Help out based on understanding other people’s needs and feelings
• Understand customers’ needs and match them to services or products
• Seek ways to increase customers’ satisfaction and loyalty
• Gladly offer appropriate assistance
• Grasp a customer’s perspective, acting as a trusted advisor
• Are skilled at persuasion
• Fine-tune presentations to appeal to the listener
• Are effective in give-and-take, registering emotional cues in attuning their message
• Deal with difficult issues straightforwardly
• Handle difficult people and tense situations with diplomacy and tact
• Orchestrate win-win solutions

In addition, outstanding customer service leaders:

• Acknowledge and reward people’s strengths, accomplishments, and development
• Offer useful feedback and identify people’s needs for development
• Mentor, give timely coaching, and offer assignments that challenge and grow a person’s skill.
• Understand the forces that shape views and actions of clients, customers, or competitors
• Accurately read situations and organizational and external realities
• Use complex strategies like indirect influence to build consensus and support
• Listen well and seek mutual understanding
• Welcome sharing of information fully
• Foster open communication and stay receptive to bad news as well as good
• Articulate and arouse enthusiasm for a shared vision and mission
• Step forward to lead as needed, regardless of position
• Guide the performance of others while holding them accountable
• Lead by example
• Recognize the need for change and remove barriers
• Challenge the status quo to acknowledge the need for change
• Champion the change and enlist others in its pursuit
• Model the change expected of others
• Spot potential conflict, bring disagreements into the open, and help deescalate
• Encourage debate and open discussion
• Build rapport and keep others in the loop
• Make and maintain personal friendships among work associates
• Balance a focus on task with attention to relationships
• Collaborate, sharing plans, information, and resources
• Promote a friendly, cooperative climate
• Model team qualities like respect, helpfulness, and cooperation
• Draw all members into active and enthusiastic participation
• Build team identity, esprit de corps, and commitment
• Protect the group and its reputation
• Share credit

See also this article which codes the whole EC Framework according to customer service requirements: basic competencies, higher-level competencies, and competencies for customer service leaders.

What Makes Customers Tick?

Excerpts from What Makes Customers Tick?
Lewis P. Carbone, in Marketing Management

Most businesses have no idea why customers behave as they do 

• There's never been a better time or a more compelling reason to get to know your customers. Given the challenges facing business today, it's not surprising that the Marketing Science Institute lists "greater insight into the customer experience" as one of its top research needs. Increasingly, we have the means to achieve that end. Innovative new approaches and research tools are now becoming available to help businesses expand their view of customers and dig deeper to understand what truly makes them tick.
• The practice of going directly to consumers to find out what they think about a product, service, or experience is a basic foundation for business decisions every day. Implicit in this practice is the assumption that customers will accurately report their thoughts and desires. Yet time and again companies engage in painstaking and expensive research to guide new initiatives, only to find that consumer behavior in the marketplace bears no resemblance to what their research indicated.
• Marketing has always been based on taking consumers at their word - on grilling them for insights about their tastes, buying habits, and brand attitudes. Yet approximately 60%-80% of all new products fail. Why? Because traditional research doesn't take into account how the consumer mind works.

How the Brain Works

Up to this point, much of the effort put forth to understand customers has dealt with how they behave and what they have to say. What has not been developed -- in large part because the capability hasn't existed -- is a deeper understanding of why customers behave the way they do.

• Most conventional market research assumes customers understand how they develop preferences and feelings about their experiences. However, we're learning that the conscious choices consumers make are determined almost exclusively through unconscious processes.
• By relying on consumers to accurately report why they act the way they do, popular research methods like focus groups and surveys very often force customers to develop "intellectual alibis" -- to make sense out of things that they simply aren't able to articulate due to their subconscious origins. Instead of the real reason for buying or not buying something, these conscious-centered approaches result in rationalizations based on how people think they ought to be motivated.
• The good news is that in the last decade neuroscientists have learned more about how the human brain works -- how people process data, both consciously and unconsciously -- than in all previous centuries combined. Because of this, we can now begin reaping valuable insights based on how customers formulate their thoughts and preferences about a product, service, or the total experience.
• In particular, modern neurological research shows that people don't think and draw conclusions in linear, hierarchical ways or in exclusively conscious ways. Instead, they glean cues and bits of information from all the senses, above and below awareness, to form a composite experiential impression that becomes a basis for preference, loyalty, and advocacy.

What Customers Can't Say

• Opinions, even though they are conscious expressions, seldom tell the complete story. Science is proving that the unconscious dynamics of customer thinking provide the richest understanding of attitudes, behavior, and loyalty tendencies. Studies in neuroscience have revealed that as much as 95% of all thinking occurs in our subconscious, which means it is also the starting point for conscious action.
• It's that dynamic linking that explains the failure of conscious-focused research activities to correctly predict consumer responses in the marketplace. Like the tip of a very large iceberg, the rational reasons consumers give for their buying decisions and preferences are highly influenced by the mass of information below the surface of consciousness. By the time people become aware of a decision on a conscious level, it has already happened in their unconscious mind.

Choose Your Tool

• New approaches are emerging that provide windows into unconscious consumer thinking. And "experience management" perspectives and techniques are making it possible to translate that information into more relevant day-to-day interactions.
• In How Customers Think, Gerald Zaltman states that the foundation for understanding customers is to "draw on research from an array of disciplines to extend managers' comfort zones." Those disciplines may range from musicology, neurology, philosophy, and linguistics to the more familiar fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Combined, Zaltman notes, they give marketers powerful new tools to help them "better understand what happens in the complex system of mind, brain, body, and society when consumers evaluate products and the experiences they have with them."
• What follows are some examples of innovative approaches in the areas of interpersonal, observational, and linguistics research. From them, it will become more obvious how drawing on an array of disciplines offers marketers expanded options for putting together a more complete picture of consumers.

Thinking Metaphorically

One of the most productive of the innovative research strategies pioneered by Zaltman is the study of the metaphors that consumers use to express their thoughts and feelings (the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, or ZMET for short).

• A metaphor is a way to understand one thing in terms of something else. For example, the metaphor of "being in good hands" has nothing to do with being physically touched or held, but the meaning is clear.
• Neuroscience has revealed that humans think more in images than in words. For this reason, metaphor elicitation researchers rely on visual images chosen by respondents in one-to-one customer interviews to help surface metaphors. When recognized and probed for the thinking behind them, metaphors are considered reliable vehicles for transporting unconscious thoughts to conscious awareness.
• This is enormously useful information because, as Zaltman states, "no matter what the characteristics of a product, experience, or brand, it will always be initially perceived by consumers in some organizing framework or metaphor." What's more, universal metaphors are often revealed after probing just a handful of interview respondents. Once surfaced and recognized, these metaphors become an invaluable form of shorthand for understanding how offerings and experiences fit into people's lives. And those insights often become the basis for new product designs, communications, or experience designs.

Learn by Observing

Most businesses rely on that hard data in lieu of observing consumers in their natural settings -- and often miss important insights as a direct consequence. But companies are discovering that simply observing customers offers a wealth of information they cannot get with traditional research methods. With enhanced technological capabilities, watching consumers in their natural settings is becoming an important part of the expanded research mix.

• During development of Quicken, its top-selling accounting software, Intuit brought users into labs and even sent engineers into people's homes to see how they used the product. This took engineers a step beyond what customers verbalized and enabled them to see how clients physically used the product. "This type of observation gives you a depth of understanding beyond which customers can articulate," says Craig Cunningham, CEO of Customer Integrated Solutions, a consultancy that helps companies create client-driven initiatives. "It gets you past what clients think they need and helps you see what they really require."
• Paco Underhill, a retail anthropologist, has done considerable research documenting the "science of shopping." Through video observation and customer interviews, he has observed more than 1,000 distinct shopping elements, everything from how shoppers negotiate department store doorways on a busy Saturday to how often they touch the merchandise before buying and the intricate ballet of product placement on the shelf.

The Right Words

When an organization understands the effect of certain words in specific contexts, and is able to cue metaphors where possible, the impact of its communication can improve exponentially. The fast-deepening science of linguistics offers marketers exciting ways to understand customers and communicate more effectively with them.

• Charles Cleveland, founder of Communications Development Corporation (CDC) and former director of the Academic Computing Center at Drake University, has developed patented conversation analysis software that can make ultra-fine distinctions in the human communication process. It does this by comparing the language of one context (or group) to another and recommending the necessary language shifts to move to the desired context.
• To see the power of even simple nuances, consider this example from "The Little Words in Life," a paper delivered by Cleveland in 2000 as part of the University of Toronto Distinguished Fellow Series. Imagine you are renting a car at an airport. And you're in a hurry. The agent at counter A says, "I'll have a car for you soon." The agent at counter B says, "I'll have the car for you soon." Which car agency would have the edge in making you feel most confident that your need was understood and it would be met? Most likely rental counter B because the words its agent used, "the car," imply it has a specific car picked out, creating an impression that the vehicle is being readied just for you and will be brought down in a minute. At the other counter, "a car" left a more general impression -- it's even possible someone might still be out searching for a car in the lot.

The implications for how customers experience businesses in the years to come are profound. Organizations that develop expanded approaches for understanding their customers will gain powerful competitive advantages. It's the difference between trying to make judgments from a single snapshot or having an array of perspectives from different vantage points that offers a far more holistic and truthful picture. The ability to play back a video, assess body language, gain insights from verbal contexts, or surface meaningful metaphors will lead to far more relevant connections with customers, which will lead to greater differentiation, loyalty, and value for all concerned.

Read: Lewis Carbone, Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again
Hear: Lou Carbone & Chuck Feltz, Experience As A Value Proposition
See also: Gerald Zaltman on Creativity

Because it feels good

Excerpts from Dazzle Me! By the editors at Dartnell. Writer: David Dee

“Providing great customer service is a triple win,” says Paul Timm, a professor at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. “Your customers feel good, your organization prospers, and you feel good.”

Q: In 50 Powerful ideas, you say “the best reason to give good service is that it makes you feel better.” What do you mean?

A: If customers expect that they’re going to be treated poorly, they become defensive and begin treating you, the employee, poorly. Very few people can put up with the day-to-day barrage of unhappy customers who expect to be treated poorly.

Q: What’s the alternative?

A: Choose to provide outstanding customer service instead. No one can force another person to give good service beyond the most rudimentary mechanical levels. But when we choose to give of ourselves – to apply the power of customer service - we feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction. Then, a job can be fun and rewarding.

Q: A cynic might say that most customer service jobs don’t pay enough for all that extra effort.

A: But there are other rewards. Like the satisfaction you feel for acting professionally on the job. And providing good customer service is really teaching you how to get along with people. Those skills are widely applicable to all the relationships in our lives, personal and professional.

Q: You’ve said that providing good service can be fun. How’s that?

A: For most people, true fun is equated with satisfaction. It’s fun to feel good about something you’ve accomplished. It’s fun to know you have the power to give of yourself to achieve team success. It’s fun to grow as a person and develop new skills and abilities, and to know you’re increasing in value every day through your experience and learning.

Anger triggers

You can help defuse a tense encounter, or at least not make it worse, by avoiding behaviors that trigger anger in customers. Here are some common triggers to avoid.

Non-verbal triggers

• Tone of voice: sarcastic, condescending, disbelieving 
• Body language: looking away, looking at your watch, smirking, scoffing, rolling your eyes, drumming your fingers, invading personal space
• Other trigger actions: Long wait times (waiting to speak to a manager, long hold times, etc), hanging up on customers, passing the buck

Verbal triggers, and what to say or do instead
(Alternatives proposed below are guidelines, not scripts. Smart customers can see through scripts – be authentic, use your own words)

• You’re wrong.   
  It doesn’t help to tell customers that they’re wrong, even when they are. Just courteously state the facts, as supported by evidence. Let the facts speak for themselves.
• I’m sorry you feel that way.
  People can see through this old trick. Say sorry only when you’re sorry. Even when the customer is not completely right, identify what could have been done better, and apologize for those mistakes.
• I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
  May have caused? If an inconvenience was caused, apologize for it directly.
• That’s the policy … I can’t do that
  "That’s contrary to our policy, but I know what you mean. Let me see what I can do."
• No way ... Not gonna happen ... That's impossible
  "I tried to do that for another customer, but I really couldn't get it approved."
• That’s not my job.
  It is your job. Take ownership of the problem.
• As I’d already said … As I’d said before
  Just repeat or paraphrase what you had said, without saying you’d already said it.
• You have to . . .
  "Would you please …"   
• I don’t know.
  Find out.    
• I assume . . . I guess
  Get the facts. Don’t assume, don’t guess.
• You should have …
  "In case this happens again, it might help you to …"
• Calm down.
  These words often have the opposite effect. Practice calming techniques instead.
• I’m going to have to end this conversation … You must leave the building
  This ought to be the last resort, but it’s too frequently thrown about by people who do not have the ability or the inclination to manage difficult situations. Should only be used when customers are truly dysfunctional.

Have a favorite trigger? Please share it here.

The revolution begins with you

When I started this blog, one of my concerns was that the customer service literature mainly tends to treat those of us who actually provide the service as objects to be manipulated (see "That's a good doggie"). I argue that for any customer service program to succeed, providers must turn that bias on its head. We must exercise leadership, and take personal responsibility for our success. While trying to develop that theme, I recalled this article by Peter Drucker, who died in November 2005, after having devoted 70 of his 95 years to the hope that he could make us better people, as well as better managers.

Excerpts from Managing Oneself
Peter Drucker, in Harvard Business Review

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen  profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive.

To do those things well, you'll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself -- not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

What Are My Strengths?

• A person can perform only from strength.
• We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.
• Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.
• The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
• Several implications for action follow from feedback analysis.
• First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
• Second, work on improving your strengths.
• Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it. Far too many people -- especially people with great expertise in one area -- are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.
• It is equally essential to remedy your bad habits -- the things you do or fail to do that inhibit your effectiveness and performance.
• One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

How Do I Perform?

• Amazingly few people know how they get things done. Indeed, most of us do not even know that different people work and perform differently. Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees nonperformance.
• Like one's strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of personality.
• Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best perform. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs.
• Am I a reader or a listener? What’s the best way for you to get information? The first thing to know is whether you are a reader or a listener. Far too few people even know that there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both. Even fewer know which of the two they themselves are.
• How do I learn? There are people who learn by writing. Some people learn by taking copious notes. Some people learn by doing. Others learn by hearing themselves talk.
• Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if you do work well with people, you then must ask, In what relationship? Some people work best as subordinates. Some people work best as team members. Others work best alone.
• Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser? A great many people perform best as advisers but cannot take the burden and pressure of making the decision. A good many other people, by contrast, need an adviser to force themselves to think; then they can make decisions and act on them with speed, self-confidence, and courage.
• Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?
• Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?.
• Do not try to change yourself -- you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.

What Are My Values?

• To be able to manage yourself, you finally have to ask, What are my values?
• Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person's values must be compatible with the organization's values. They do not need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist. Otherwise, the person will not only be frustrated but also will not produce results.
• A person's strengths and the way that person performs rarely conflict; the two are complementary. But there is sometimes a conflict between a person's values and his or her strengths. What one does well--even very well and successfully -- may not fit with one's value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one's life to.
• Values are and should be the ultimate test.

Where Do I Belong?

• Most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong.
• Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong. The person who has learned that he or she does not perform well in a big organization should have learned to say no to a position in one. The person who has learned that he or she is not a decision maker should have learned to say no to a decision-making assignment.
• Equally important, knowing the answer to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, "Yes, I will do that. But this is the way I should be doing it. This is the way it should be structured. This is the way the relationships should be. These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.”
• Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person -- hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre -- into an outstanding performer.

What Should I Contribute?

• Knowledge workers have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
• It is rarely possible -- or even particularly fruitful -- to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half? The answer must balance several things.
• First, the results should be hard to achieve -- they should require "stretching," to use the current buzzword. But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved -- or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances -- is not being ambitious; it is being foolish.
• Second, the results should be meaningful. They should make a difference.
• Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.
• From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.

Responsibility for Relationships

• Very few people work by themselves and achieve results by themselves. Most people work with others and are effective with other people. Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships. This has two parts.
• The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. This means that they too have their strengths; they too have their ways of getting things done; they too have their values. To be effective, therefore, you have to know the strengths, the performance modes, and the values of your coworkers.
• Bosses are individuals and are entitled to do their work in the way they do it best. It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of "managing" the boss.
• The same holds true for all your coworkers. Each works his or her way, not your way. And each is entitled to work in his or her way. What matters is whether they perform and what their values are. As for how they perform -- each is likely to do it differently. The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values.
• The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication. Most conflicts arise from the fact that people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what contribution the other people are concentrating on and what results they expect. And the reason they do not know is that they have not asked and therefore have not been told.
• Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another. Taking responsibility for relationships is therefore an absolute necessity. It is a duty.

Conclusion

The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naïve. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves, profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put.

But today the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.

Dysfunctional customers

Customer service initiatives should be grounded in integrity and reality. One aspect of that reality is that in fact customers are not always right. It undermines one’s credibility to contend that they are. This paper is an important contribution to the understanding that there are dysfunctional customers, and that their behaviors have serious consequences.

While I agree with most of the propositions in this paper, I have one fundamental disagreement. In my long experience at the front lines of customer service, I have found that dysfunctional customers are rare. More often than not, disruptive behaviors can be avoided by (1) providing good customer service in the first place, and (2) managing situations before they get out of hand.

I should probably note that the most egregious manifestations of dysfunctional behavior cited in this study occurred in bars.

Excerpts from The consequences of dysfunctional customer behavior
Lloyd C Harris & Kate L Reynolds in Journal of Service Research

This article addresses dysfunctional customer behavior, which refers to actions by customers who intentionally or unintentionally, overtly or covertly, act in a manner that, in some way, disrupts otherwise functional service encounters.

Classifications of dysfunctional customers

Zemke and Anderson, typology of five "customers from hell":

• abusive egocentrics
• insulting whiners
• hysterical shouters
• dictators
• freeloaders

With the objective of gaining faster, superior, or even free service, such customers use service encounters in a dysfunctional manner (at least from the perspective of service providers and other customers).

Lovelock's "jaycustomers":

• thieves
• rule breakers
• the belligerent
• vandals
• family feuders
• deadbeats

Drivers and forms of dysfunctional customer behavior

• psychological characteristics - personality traits, attitudes, the extent of moral development, aspiration fulfillment, the desire for thrill seeking, and aberrant psychological dispositions
• demographic characteristics - age, sex, education, and economic status
• social influences - socialization, norm formation, and peer pressure
• contextual factors - physical environment, types of products/services offered, level of deterrence, public image of the firm
• perceptions of a store's relative power
• customer dissatisfaction - consumer retaliation due to customer perceptions of inequalities and the need to restore equity
• combination of the interaction characteristics

Key findings of this study

• All of the customer-contact employees interviewed reported that they witnessed, or were involved in, some form of dysfunctional customer behavior on a daily basis
• 82% of customer-contact staff had either witnessed or been subjected to violent or aggressive behavior within the last calendar year
• 54% believe that their working lives were "significantly affected" by unrelenting dysfunctional customer behavior

Figure 1 is a framework of the consequences of dysfunctional customer behavior. Briefly, the framework presents three main consequences of dysfunctional customer behavior, namely, effects on (1) employees, (2) customers, and (3) the organization.

Effects on employees

Long-Term Psychological Consequences

• sustained feelings of degradation, humiliation, or subjugation - feelings of worthlessness and humiliation long after specific events
• stress disorders - caused by extreme dysfunctional customer behavior that years later continued to result in memory flashbacks, anxiety, and sleeplessness

Short-Term Emotional Effects

93% of employees interviewed indicated that dysfunctional customer behavior negatively affected their emotional state.

• short-term emotional distress, such as fear, stress, frustration, anger, hatred, and irritation
• feigned emotional display - what has become known as emotional labor

Behavioral Consequences

• low levels of motivation and morale among customer-contact employees.
• high levels of esprit de corps and effective customer-contact employee teamwork
• increased desire of customer-contact employees to retaliate, to take revenge, or to sabotage the efforts of dysfunctional customers

Physical Consequences

• violence toward an employee
• damage of employees' personal property

78% of informants reported that they had witnessed or encountered more "restrained" forms of physical violence by customers.

Consequences for customers

Domino effect

• collective expression of sympathy toward the frontline employee who has been a victim of "unreasonable" customer behavior or, less frequently
• the contagion of dysfunctional customer behavior by witnesses of the customers' behavior, particularly vociferous or illegitimate complaining

Spoilt Consumption Effects

Exposure to acute or sustained dysfunctional customer behavior increases the likelihood that the consumption experience of proximate customers will be negatively affected.

Organizational consequences

Indirect Financial Costs

• increased workloads for members of staff who are required to deal with dysfunctional customer behavior, thus reducing employee time to serve functional customers effectively
• negative financial implications for personnel in terms of staff retention, recruitment, induction, and training

46% of informants claim that they had no long-term career plans in their employing organization or even the broader hospitality industry due to frequent exposure to such behavior.

Direct Financial Costs

Acute or sustained dysfunctional customer behavior increases the likelihood of direct financial costs, in terms of expenses incurred in restoring damaged property, additional legal costs, increased insurance premiums, property loss, costs incurred in recompensing customers, and the costs accrued through "illegitimate" claims by dysfunctional customers.

Discussions and Implications

• The current study illustrates the pervasiveness of dysfunctional customer behavior and, in this regard, undermines the veracity of the notion of consumer sovereignty in that dysfunctional customer behavior is consistently found.
• Not only are customers "not always right," in fact, they can frequently lie, cheat, act abusively, and even physically or psychologically harm customer-contact employees.
• The mantra "customer perception is reality" is too frequently mentioned to the detriment of the accuracy, legitimacy, validity, and communality of such a reality. From the perspective of customer-contact employees, many customers' views of reality are not simply incorrect but, all too frequently, personally damaging and in some cases intentionally biased.
• In many organizations, there appears to be dichotomous realities for those serving and in daily contact with customers and those who generate and enforce customer-related policies. Thus, the espoused cultural beliefs and prescribed procedures enforced centrally appear somewhat divorced from the perceived reality of the customer interface.
• This study also provides another illustration of the need of customer service encounters to be, in the broader sense of the term, "managed." That is, these results confirm and further emphasize the need for service organizations to ensure that every aspect and moment of service encounters is considered, organized, carefully staged, controlled, and supervised by the firm.  The contribution of the current study is to highlight the need for the differentiated management of functional and dysfunctional customers.
• The emphasis placed on improving service standards in the 1990s and the earlier stress on customer focus in the 1980s have overemphasized the view of customer sovereignty and underplayed the dysfunctional, the deviant, and the dark side of service.