Book Review Blog

I was staying in a hotel recently and rang down to the restaurant to order a meal which I said I would come down to eat immediately as I was going out shortly.

I ended up waiting nearly 30 minutes for my meal. The staff, who I see regularly, were all very friendly and nice but they somehow didn’t take me seriously that I wanted my meal in a hurry.

When I asked one of them where my meal was up to she said with a cheery smile that the order was on the rack and shouldn’t be long and that she didn’t know what the hold up might be.

There was no acknowledgement on her part that I wasn’t getting what I asked for and neither did she appear to do anything to hurry the meal up.

The staff at this restaurant are obviously not trained in excellent communication. She was not able to change her approach from friendly and nice to professional and concerned. She, and her colleagues had only one mode of customer service.

This was illustrated when I expressed my disappointment at the delay. None of them knew how to respond to me in a clear and calm way. When I made this rather mild complaint they looked flustered and embarrassed.

Great customer service means that no matter what the customer says the staff member can tune in to their needs and respond with appropriate words and actions.  

People buy on emotion. Relationships are based on emotion. What do you do when someone is really emotional? It might be a customer, staff member or spouse who gets upset. You want to calm them down so you can deal with the business issues at hand. Many people think that by being reasonable they can communicate best. However, the other person is not rational in this moment, they are emotional. When someone is emotional they are feeling a great deal and they are expressing this to you. They want to be acknowledged, seen, and heard in this moment of distress. If you make your first response to them an acknowledgement of their feelings you will go a long way to building a strong business relationship. This acknowledgment may be as simple as “Oh dear, I’m sorry that XYZ has happened” or “This has been a real nuisance for you, hasn’t it” or “Wow, I am sorry, I didn’t realise how much it has affected you” or even “Bugger!” (said in a caring kind of way). Don’t rush on with more words, pause to let what you have said sink in and give time for them to respond before going for the ‘fix it’ part of your response.

Alan did the first day of the TUF workshop and was sceptical about trying the idea of responding to the emotion when someone is upset. On the weekend between sessions he had parked his car across the driveway of the business next door to where he went shopping. When he came out the owner of the business was trying to get his vehicle in the driveway, past Alan’s car. He started shouting and swearing. Alan was taken aback at first. And then he remembered. Respond to the emotion. “I guess it must be pretty frustrating having people do this all the time. I’m really sorry.” He said to the irate business owner.

Alan was really surprised how quickly the guy cooled down. “It was almost instant,” he told me when we met for the second session. “I didn’t really believe it when you told us this last week but I can see that it really does work”.

The court case is continuing against Eric Smail, of Christchurch who murdered the tetraplegic friend he had been caring for over a number of years. Their relationship had become strained and Eric wasn’t coping.

A short time before the murder he was in the pub with some friends and had tried to tell them he was having difficulties with his friend. They just laughed it off and didn’t hear his distress. This made him feel worse and he murdered his friend that night.

While this is no excuse for murdering someone and I don’t condone what he did in the least, I am aware that things may have turned out differently if his friends had listened to him and taken him seriously, even for a few minutes.

In every single one of the terrible shootings in high schools in the United States the gunman had, in the weeks leading up to the shooting, expressed similar distress to someone in that community and they had not been listened to. 

The best thing to do when someone says they are unhappy or upset about something is to stop, give them your serious attention and listen to them. Eventually they may need to talk with a professional counsellor rather than you, but right now, you are the one they are telling, so take them seriously!

A little snippet in the paper yesterday said Russell Crow had been excluded from a pub somewhere in England because he caused too much trouble. Russell caused difficulties once before when he threw a phone at the concierge in a New York hotel. At the time he said this is how we settle things where I come from (NZ). He has to have been misquoted, surely!

What can you do when people like Russell Crow nut-off and get upset. Sometimes there's not a lot you can do but hold your own dignity. It is worth acknowledging that you see they are upset. It can be helpful to apologise that they have been put out, or the service hasn't met their expectation. This is not accepting blame for what has happened. It is letting them know they are not alone with their feelings and distress.

In the end, if they persist in raving on and on, it is best to look after yourself by not taking it personally. It is their emotion, not yours. Keep breathing and think 'I'm OK, you're OK'.

How to give good feedback

Many of the TUF principles that front line staff use are for quick customer interactions where the customer will leave after a few minutes. Mostly you can't ask them to change their behaviour. You just need to work out ways to live with it and be able to respond to them.

But what about the difficult internal customer? How do you ask them to change their unwanted behaviour when they are going to be with you every day?

Transactional Analysis has a method they call the 'stroke sandwich'. That is positive negative positive.

Positive
Say something positive about the person, what you appreciate about their work, them or their ability.

Negative
Tell them what part of their behaviour is unacceptable to you

Positive
Reaffirm you desire to work well with them, mention something positive you can truthfully say about them.

The saga with JetStar, the new budget airline operating in New Zealand continues. Over the weekend a number of passengers were turned away from the check-in counter because they arrived less the 30 minutes before take-off. Some who were shut out said they arrived earlier but the queues were too slow. 

JetStar want to set their rules very clearly. They want people to know that this 30 minute cut-off time is absolute. This is their right and it’s probably a good way to run a budget airline.   

The customer service point they seem to have missed from the reports I have read is that they have shown very little empathy for the passengers who missed out. Even if they were going to exclude someone from the flight they could still say ‘Sorry about that, it is hard isn’t it’ or something that lets the disgruntled passenger see that their feelings have been noticed. 

The cynic in me says that all this publicity has generated heaps of newspaper coverage that informs the whole country that this airline is now operating.

Jetstar, the budget airline has begun operating in New Zealand with budget style customer service. The DomPost reported that when passengers turned up one minute late for the 30 minute check-in they were not allowed to board the plane. Fair enough except the staff did not know how to break the bad news to their customers. "They were so unhelpful - the man who took my ticket just said, 'Yeah, we've shut it'. I wouldn't have minded if they were apologetic". And that is the rub. Even when you have to deliver bad news to your customers, if you are at least apologetic the damage won't be so bad. By being apologetic you recognise that the customer is having a hard time with your decision and that helps keep the relationship positive to some degree.

The Book

If you wonder why there are not many postings to the blog over the past year then wonder no more.

I've been working on the book Thriving Under Fire. This 150 page work tells the story of Sophie and her team at Sophie's Cafe & Bar. She makes great coffee and cake but has such difficulty with customer service, especially with those difficult customers who regularly bother her.

Meet Rose, Angus and Lily who work for Sophie and go on a journey of discovering that they don't have to be beaten down by all the difficult customers they come across.

In fact they learn to respond very well to those situations and really make things hum in the Cafe. I won't tell you the whole story otherwise that would spoil it.

The book went to the printer yesterday and will be available from 26th June. The book launch will be on Friday 3rd July in Wellington. Contact us if you want to come to the launch.

You can buy the book by clicking on this link

What would Alan Duff say about this. 

Northland MP, John Carter was also pulled up by the police.  When asked if his vehicle was registered he got angry and swore at the police.  This incident found it's way into the New Zealand Herald and other national newspapers.

The leader of the National Party, John Key, was quick to go on television and to the papers and say that such behaviour is 'totally unacceptable'.  John Carter had to apologise to the police.

Now I don't encourage people to get angry and swear at the police or anyone else when they are upset.  However we do get two different pictures here.  The judge in Taupo last week said the right to express yourself only in a restrained way is no right at all.

The real challenge is how to respond to someone who is angry like this.  If you focus on how 'bad' they are you will only make it worse.  Better to recognise that they are upset for whatever reason and acknowledge that. 

The process of changing our life position begins in earnest during adolescence when we develop competence and confidence in many things. With loving support and encouragement of mentors and peers, we gradually develop a sense of ‘OKness’.   We need to be able to admit that at times we feel ‘not OK’. We need to be able to live with that discomfort and trust we can also change. 

If you still hold the life position of I’m not Ok, you’re OK, you can begin changing today. Acknowledge the discomfort. Consciously change your script and begin living as if it were true. 

Alan Duff does a “rant”. He claims to the judge in the Taupo court that this is not aggressive. It is just a rant. The policewoman involved in issuing him the speeding ticket certainly thought he was aggressive.