Are you proactive or reactive? Many times it seems like the difference doesn’t matter. Today I was in the audiologist’s office, and the staff had two reactive situations. First they ran out of the form that each customer needs to fill out at the beginning of the appointment. Then, when they went to print more, the printer was out of toner. Both were solved easily once someone went to the right office to get more toner.
It would have been easy to be proactive. To check at the beginning of the day and ask – have we done everything we need to do to ensure our customers have a great experience today?
The temptation is to be ok with the reactive. Why? Because nothing bad happened. Sure the customers had to wait a few minutes longer, but no one got angry. No one got in trouble.
But is “nothing bad happened” the standard for a customer service organization? The customer probably has a different standard. Was I treated with care and respect? Was my time respected? Did the customer service organization put forth a reasonable effort to anticipate my needs and meet them?
Each time we accept the reactive standard that “nothing bad happened,” we agree to a bigger set of norms. We agree to be externally motivated instead of internally motivated. We agree to let someone else dictate the terms of our excellence. We agree to create less good in the world than we could. We agree to play a finite game, when we could choose to play an infinite game. We agree that the customer is not the focus of our customer service organization.
Here’s why this is so important. Every organization is a customer service organization.