2019 – Jason Whitman

Answering the right question

I recently was helping my team with customer emails and chats during a company retreat. This is one of my favorite times of the year, because I get to make sure my skills are still reasonably sharp, and I can help to offset volume while my employees are getting a break from work.

One lesson I reminded myself of when doing this work is making sure I am answering what the customer is actually asking. If I move too fast, jump to conclusions or make assumptions, I can be slightly off, which likely means more interactions to solve the issue, and maybe even customer frustration.

One email exchange I jumped into was facing this for a specific reason – the employee was using published macros to respond to the customer, but none of them really addressed his issue. They were close but slightly missing. When I dug into the situation, I learned that the customer fundamentally didn’t understand something about the product. That was actually fine, but never could have been uncovered or answered by a macro. It was a nice reminder that although macros, talking points, scripts and the like help to provide efficiency and consistency, they are not always the right solution, and they sometimes don’t or can’t actually answer the customer’s question.

In another situation, I caught myself getting too excited because I thought I knew the answer to something, which then resulted in wrong assumptions and customer confusion. While it felt natural to try to go fast, it led me to answer the wrong question. In this chat interaction, the behavior showed up when I was making statements rather than asking questions. Example:

Me: So, the employee has this benefit through an outside provider.

This was dead wrong, because I had made an assumption based on too little information. While I don’t think the customer cared too much, she had to correct me and the solution took longer than it needed. After, I thought about how it could have gone better, and realized I could have asked questions to learn more rather than making an assumptive statement:

Me: Does the employee have this benefit through an outside provider?

Or, even more generally:

Me: Can you tell me more about what’s going on and how I can help?

That would have led me to answering the right question much more quickly, and without a customer correction. Overall, this exchange was a great reminder and something I have been thinking a lot about since – these little efficiency wins (or losses), although seemingly small in the moment, add up as a team scales, and can really hurt in times of increased volume.

My service foundation

When I turned 16, my dad made me get a job. He gave me a list of places I had to visit to apply. They were mostly retailers – I remember visiting Blockbuster Video, Toys R Us and Sears specifically. I knew that I had an “in” at Sears – my dad went to high school with the store manager. This meant an immediate interview instead of the traditional paper application, and also getting hired in literally minutes after walking into his office.

I really didn’t think to apply anywhere else – my dad told me to get a job and now I had one. At the time, I really didn’t know that this first gig in customer service would act as a foundation for many years later. I worked at Sears all through high school, originally as a Sales Associate in sporting goods and then expanding to paint, hardware and lawn and garden when I wanted more hours. I got paid minimum wage plus commission, so it was also my first experience with pay for performance. I stayed for five years, working on and off during breaks in college.

I am sharing this story because I interview a lot of candidates and they often ask how I got my start in customer service. It would be easy to leave a retail job like Sears off a resume, but it really was my foundation in the industry. So much so, I recently decided to add it to my resume on Indeed and to my LinkedIn profile.

I learned a lot doing that job, especially around integrity and ethics. One of my favorite team members, and someone I considered a protege, was fired one day for helping someone steal merchandise. I had to come to grips with that incident and the decisions he had made, which was not easy for a sub-20-year-old.

Another of my most memorable experiences happened one day when I was working the sporting goods floor, and another employee, I’ll call him Vinny, was working in lawn and garden. Vinny was a Sears “lifer” – he had been in a the job for a very long time, and raised a family along the way. Vinny was near retirement and never seemed to have much patience for us younger employees.

That day, Vinny was covering lawn and garden solo. When I think about how often we worked alone, it feels crazy to me now, but it happened all the time. I would even work double shifts totally alone. So Vinny was solo, and his department and mine were side by side. Vinny was with a customer when another customer was looking at a riding lawn mower. Now, it’s important to know that a riding mower (we actually called them “tractors” in the vernacular) was pretty much the biggest sale you could make in lawn and garden. So big that when an employee would sell one, you would hear all about it in the folklore and water cooler talk amongst the employees. Selling one meant you were a killer Sales Associate and would be getting a very nice commission payout in your next check.

Because I had backup in my area, I was walking the floor and the customer near the tractors asked for help. I knew enough at that point to be dangerous, but really didn’t want to mess with Vinny’s pay (or whatever wrath he would rain down on me). But the customer asked a second time, and I had to make the call on what was more important, Vinny’s take-home pay or the customer experience. I ended up helping the customer, and I sold a tractor!

The second that transaction ended and the customer was gone, I turned around and saw Vinny very quickly walking in my direction. He said nothing. He grabbed our copy of the receipt, quickly walked back to his register, and voided the transaction. He then re-did the transaction under his employee ID (this meant that he technically made the sale and would get paid commission for it).

I was more stunned than upset, and didn’t really know what to do. What Vinny did felt wrong, but I also knew it was his department, not mine, and he had kids to feed. I had never experienced this type of professional ethical dilemma before. I decided to ask for some time with the store manager (now someone else, as my dad’s friend had retired), and just told her the story, not expecting anything to happen. But after hearing what occurred, she got up, walked to the nearest register, and put the sale back in my name.

When I got my check the next week and it had the commission amount for the tractor sale, I was really grateful to work at a place where integrity prevailed.

Looking back, I had so many first service experiences at Sears. I had a customer hug me for the first time, I had my first escalation (went terribly), I learned to upsell and cross-sell. We closed my first store and opened a new one. I watched friends come and go in the same role, and saw many “lifers” keep persevering.

In my last year there, my department manager suggested I apply for the Sears management training program, which, at the time, was highly regarded. It would have meant moving back home from where I was going to college, so I declined. But I am grateful for the foundation that job provided to me. I’ll never leave it off my resume again.

Channel switching usually stinks

Last Fall, I Tweeted about channel switching in customer service:

There *may* be cases where channel switching is OK (security verification, for example), but some brands handle that gracefully too (such as switching from social to live chat, which is a similar channel). But simply saying, “Thanks for writing, call this phone number” is lame.

— Jason Whitman (@jasonwhitman) October 7, 2018

And I wrote about it lightly as part of my post about how Verizon handles social customer service.

This topic has been on my mind because of an experience I recently had with Chase, the enormous consumer bank. Very oddly, Chase decided one day to put a restriction on all of my accounts, which caused any scheduled bill payments, transfers or ATM withdrawals to fail. When this happened, Chase gave me no warning and no notice until the failures started happening. I have been a customer since I was a teenager, so this approach was pretty surprising and disappointing.

When it was time to fix the problem, they gave me only one support channel option – in person. This was fine and seemed reasonable based on the severity of the issue. I visited a branch near my office, and while I was able to clear the block on my accounts, Chase couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me why it happened.

At first I let it go, but I later thought I should check in with them to get the full story. So I logged into my Chase account and wrote a “secure email” asking for a manager to research what happened and to share the findings. I said it wasn’t urgent and might need some digging. Chase quickly responded by saying (1) they didn’t see any previous restriction, and (2) they can only discuss compliance issues via phone.

I tried one last time, by asking them to forward my email request to the compliance team so they could investigate and share their findings. I was again told that (1) no block was recorded on my accounts and (2) if I did want to know more, I would need to call, although they understood that I prefer email.

While I totally comprehend why you wouldn’t do this kind of sensitive customer service work via social or another channel that is dependent on third-party apps, doing it in their own “secure message center” seemed reasonable. Trying to honor a customer’s preferred channel, without switching – whenever possible – feels much more supportive.