Customer Service. Your call is very important to us. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The bulk of my work is with small/medium sized nonprofits. In the vast majority their customer service is.....let's call it lacking. In many cases this is because of the monopoly nature of the nonprofit. If you need housing assistance, it's not like you can take your request to a different organization. Nope, you either deal with bad customer service or go homeless. Not optimal choices.
Seth Godin has a great post about customer service.
- Spend more money on this (and give it higher priority).
- Collect data about the nature of the calls...then fix the problems creating the calls.
- If it's going to take a while and you have to put someone on hold for lengthy, offer a simple way to be called back, and then make sure it works.
- If you're closed, give us the hours you are open.
- If someone leaves a message, ensure they get a call back within 24 hours
Rationing By The Queue is a strategy far too many nonprofits use in order to handle a heavy case load. In essence, it's making the process of receiving service so cumbersome that only the most dedicated will endure the labyrinth of procedure required to get the needed service. Bad customer service is just one aspect of this type of rationing.
We can change that....and the phone is a great place to start.
Every now and then one is confronted with something so absurd that it makes one want to
run off and sit in the meadow for a mass dandelion break.
In this case it was last week’s briefing by President Obama’s spokesperson Jay Carney stepped in front of reporters to explain the White House’s role in the IRS playing political favorites and the Department of Justice secretly obtaining the call logs of the Associated Press. This is not a Red Team/Blue Team commentary….forget the partisan talking points for a moment. What continually depresses most Americans is that this press conference was just another accepted routine bit of Theater Of The Absurd.
Jay Carney is a smart man. Has to be in order to get that high up the food chain. But everyone knows he didn’t believe half of what he was saying that day. He was Just Doing His Job. And the journalists sitting in the crowd that day. Also very smart people at the top of their industry. Not one willing to stand up and say “Oh this is just BS”. Instead they reported in dry terms the typical He Said/She Said “balanced” reporting. They were Just Doing Their Job.
In that context I came across Seth Godin’s recent post concerning Thomas Midgley, the man famous of his invention of CFCs and the idea of putting lead into gasoline in order to reduce engine knock...both environmentally destructive innovations. However, the patents on those ideas were worth billions.
Of course the introduction of lead immediately had serious health consequences for refinery workers. Yet Midgely and others quick downplayed the effects. As Godin notes:
An entrenched industry needs the public and its governments to ignore what they're doing so they can defend their status quo and extract the maximum value from their assets.
I would add this also applies doubly so to entrenched government bureaucracies, media outlets, and even third sector advocacy organizations.
Godin continues:
And we give them a pass. Because it's their job, or because it's our job, or because our culture has created a dividing line between individuals who create negative impacts and organizations that do.
People who just might, in other circumstances, stand up and speak up, decide to quietly stand by, or worse, actively lie as they engage in PR campaigns aimed at belittling or undermining those that are brave enough to point out just how damaging the status quo is.
In general, people just want to be left alone to live their lives with as minimal hassle from The Power as possible. But that is increasingly hard in a world full of Midgleys who succeed in a society which rewards spin and obfuscation. Godin concludes:
We might consider erecting a statue of him in every lobbyist's office (and college campus and public square and government bureau), a reminder to all of us that we're ultimately responsible for what we make, that spinning to defend the status quo hurts all of us, and most of all, that we have to balance the undeniable benefits of progress, innovation and industry with the costs to all concerned. I can't imagine a better person as the symbol for a day that's not about honoring or celebrating, but could be about vigilance, candor and outspokenness instead.
My suggestion: Use this post to contemplate not what they are doing, but to consider how you are defending the status quo.
