Customer care is a dog’s life

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A dog is our best friend, because he wags his tail instead of his tongue – or so it is said. If you are engaged in customer service, as we all are in one way or another, there may be a lesson to be learned here.

Looking at the way that we, our colleagues or our company greet our customers – which end of the dog are we?

Companies that greet their customers with genuine energy and enthusiasm are as rare as the Kihansi spray toad – a species now extinct in the wild.

Companies persist in making so few people available to deal with their customers that, perpetually, “All our operatives are busy at the moment.”

And we then expect us to hold on a premium rate 0871 number.

Read that again, it’s not a typo.

People like us run companies and people like us are customers. It’s bizarre that as we pass from one side of the divide to the other we consistent elect to mistreat our alter egos in ways that we ourselves object to.

My heart-sinking phone call for help is declared “important” but that apparent recognition is not matched by any perceptible effort to make someone available to receive it.

Cashier positions are unattended at lunchtimes when a flush of peak demand can be expected.

Show me a supermarket on a busy Saturday morning and I will show you unattended tills.

And why are petrol and diesel pumps now so routinely unattended that we fill our own tanks without a second thought, despite high levels of unemployment among the anxious, but aspiring young and the keen, but chronically low-waged?

There seems little doubt which end of the dog currently greets our customers. While it’s true that some companies spend time and money dreaming up schemes to encourage and build customer loyalty (the dreaded ‘card’), the very same companies – and a host of others besides – spend even more time and effort “saving” dollars by doing the opposite.

A senior buyer from a major UK brewer told me recently that his company had worked out that a cost saving of £1,000 was equivalent to an increase in sales of £39,000 and such savings were seen as easier to accomplish – hence the focus on cost-cutting.

He failed to explain what the impact would be if, in saving £1,000, he also lost £39,000 or more of sales as a consequence of poorer quality in either product or service.

Of course not, with the way we train people in narrow skills and structure companies in tight little boxes that’s hardly his problem.

The great thing about the dog is that the tail and the tongue are connected. It’s a model we would do well to imitate in business and in life.