Applebee's customer proves the customer is always right

Applebee’s is the latest company to be caught up in controversy over a receipt. This time it was a server who took a picture of a customer’s receipt and posted it online.

By my count, this is the fourth receipt-related service failure to go viral within the past twelve months, but this one adds a few new plot twists. The public outcry was largely directed against the customer who wrote “I give GOD 10% why should I give you 18” in lieu of a tip. The server who posted the photo was fired, but an online petition urging Applebee’s to reinstate her is gathering steam. And, I’m not even sure Applebee’s is at fault for what’s happened so far (more on that later).

What I do know is this incident offers further proof that the customer is always right.

The true meaning of the customer is always right
It’s unclear who first said “The customer is always right.” I tried to learn the answer while doing research for my book, Service Failure, but the best I could do was narrow it down to a few business leaders from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One of the best examples was a quote attributed to the legendary retailer, Marshall Fields. He purportedly said, “Right or wrong, the customer is always right.”

The Applebee’s customer was clearly wrong, but we wouldn't be talking about it if the server hadn't photographed the receipt and posted it online. The server neglected the advice from Marshall Fields when she went out of her way to prove the customer was wrong.

Poking a sleeping bear
Proving a customer wrong is generally a zero sum game. It tends to escalate the situation by engaging the customer’s defense mechanisms and can trigger powerful emotions such as frustration, embarrassment, or shame. In many ways it’s like poking a sleeping bear where nothing good will come out of it, but a lot of bad things are likely to happen.

In this case, the Applebee’s customer was told by friends that her receipt was posted online. This led to strong feelings of shame and embarrassment and now the Applebee’s customer was an angry bear.

Angry bears don’t apologize for their misdeeds. They call the offending restaurant and roar and roar until someone gets fired. In this case it was the server who posted the receipt online who lost her job.

Why Applebee’s isn’t (entirely) to blame
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post suggested an employee’s viral service failure is the company’s fault. That still holds true, but from the perspective that most people have heard about the Applebee’s receipt incident but don’t know the names of the individuals involved. 

The negative publicity generated by this incident may be part of the cost of doing business. The Applebee’s restaurant in question is a franchise, which means that Applebee’s doesn’t have direct managerial control over the restaurant’s employees. They also took swift action to address the issue and even confirmed that the server in question had been fired.

The situation has created some unfortunate PR challenges for Applebee’s. I’m just not sure what else they could have done. (Ideas, anyone?)

Book Review: Uncommon Service

Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of your Business.
by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss

I've read a lot of books about customer service and I must admit that many of them tend to blur together. As I read Uncommon Service, my excitement grew because I realized I was reading something that was, well, uncommon.

This book is a practical guide for leaders who want to use service to strategically differentiate their companies from the competition. The central premise is that great service fundamentally comes from the choices made in assembling an organization's business model.

One of the biggest take-aways for me was that companies can't do everything well. Smart companies understand what their customers truly value and excel at that while allowing themselves to be mediocre or even poor in even other areas. It's a trade-off necessary to focus time, energy, and resources on what really counts.

I immediately thought of In-N-Out Burger as I read about this concept. They focus on burgers and fries rather than offer a wide selection of entries like other fast food restaurants, but their burgers are really, really good. (A few years ago, I reviewed a terrific book about their story.)

I enthusiastically recommend Uncommon Service if you are interested in customer service from a strategic perspective.

Spreadsheet Jockeys are clueless about retail service

All super heroes have at least one nemesis. Batman has the Joker. Superman has Lex Luther. Outstanding Service has the Spreadsheet Jockey.

What’s a Spreadsheet Jockey? It’s an executive who designs systems and strategies to serve their customers based on data points and intuition without gathering any input from the people who are actually serving customers.

The sad, inevitable result of Spreadsheet Jockey management is service failure. Here are three examples where a spreadsheet jockey designed a system that any frontline employee could tell you would fail.

Upsell or No Sell at Staples

A month or so ago, I read an incredible story on Bruce Temkin’s blog that described how employees at Staples office supply stores were refusing to sell computers to customers who didn’t accept any of their upsell offers.

You might be tempted to say, “Fire those scoundrels!” until you learned that a fear of being fired was the cause of their behavior.

A Spreadsheet Jockey at Staples had created a standard that required sales associates to average $200 in add-ons for each computer they sold. The penalties for failing to meet the standard included progressive discipline and possible termination. While designed to increase revenue, the new policy actually gave employees a strong incentive to avoid selling computers altogether.

Why?

Let’s say you sell a computer to a customer who doesn’t buy anything else. That’s $0 in upsells on that computer, so you’d need to sell $400 in add-ons on your next computer sale to maintain the $200 average and avoid getting fired. That made a person who didn’t want any add-ons a threat to your job unless you could somehow ensure the sale didn’t go through.

A $100 solution to a $20 problem

My wife recently returned a briefcase to the store where she bought it so it could be repaired under warranty. The leather zipper pull on the main compartment had torn off, which would have been a simple repair if the luggage store had an onsite repair shop.

The fact that it couldn’t do the repair onsite shouldn’t have been a major obstacle. In a normal, sane world, the luggage store would have a relationship with a local repair shop that could help them facilitate the repair within a day or two. They might even have an authorized repair center in town that could provide same day service if my wife was willing to do a little driving.

Unfortunately, things are never that easy for customers when a Spreadsheet Jockey designs the system. The luggage store’s actual process involved shipping my wife’s bag to their corporate repair depot in New York, making my wife wait an estimated four weeks, and then shipping the bag back to our home in San Diego.

In the end, it made more sense for my wife to pay to get the repair done at a local shop than to be without her bag for four weeks while she waited for it to be repaired under warranty.

Labor models can’t see inside your store

I recently spoke with a friend who works in a retail pet store that is continuously victimized by corporate Spreadsheet Jockeys.

Exhibit A is Saturday morning, the store’s busiest time of the week. My friend would love to schedule extra sales staff to help boost sales, but his hands are tied in two ways.

First, the store’s labor model doesn’t allow him to bring in extra staff. A labor model is a tool often used in retail that tells each store how many employees they can have on each shift. It is a Spreadsheet Jockey invention that relies on data analysis to optimize labor costs, but it can also take away an individual store’s ability to react to opportunities such as a busy Saturday morning.

The second problem was the store had to take associates off the sales floor to process the weekly stock shipment. The delivery schedule was set by another Spreadsheet Jockey to optimize delivery logistics, but it didn’t factor in the impact on operations. The store had limited overstock space, so they had to get the new stock unboxed and out on the sales floor as quickly as possible. Replenishing stock is also a labor intensive job that’s usually done during slower periods, not on a busy Saturday morning when they should be helping customers and generating revenue.

A simple cure

Adam Toporek recently wrote an excellent post on his CustomersThatStick blog about the virtues of management by walking around in a customer service environment. His was point was that Spreadsheet Jockeys need to temper their data analysis with a dose of reality.

Look at the best retail operations and you'll see this happening. Executives are constantly spending time in their stores, asking questions, and observing. They realize that nobody understands their challenges better than associates, and those same associates probably have some good ideas about how to fix them. 

TPS named a 2012 Champion of Learning

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) has recognized Toister Performance Solutions, Inc. as a 2012 Champion of Learning. This designation is given in recognition for efforts to promote Employee Learning Week, an employee learning awareness campaign that is held during the first week of December.

This marks the fourth consecutive year that Toister Performance Solutions has earned this recogntion.

Hire better by redefining your purple squirrel

A client of mine recently struggled to find the perfect candidate for an open managerial position. They wanted someone who had outstanding technical and managerial skills, but this combination was proving impossible to find. They were also a small nonprofit organization, so the perfect candidate had to be willing to work for a salary that was well below market.

Recruiters often use the term “purple squirrel” to refer to the perfect candidate for hard to fill positions like my client's. Like purple squirrels, these people are often difficult, if not impossible to find.

It’s time to get real
A recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog advised companies to stop searching for the perfect candidate because it is often a futile effort that does nothing more than waste time and money.

In my client’s case, searching for a purple squirrel had caused them to leave an important position unfilled while they searched for someone who didn’t exist. They found a fair number of people with the required technical skills but not the managerial skills or vice-versa. On the rare occasions when they found someone who appeared to have both, they quickly learned their budget was nowhere near that person’s salary expectations.

It was time for my client to face reality if they wanted to fill this position. 

Redefining your purple squirrel
When my client turned to me for help, we were able to create a solution in just two hours by using a worksheet to profile of an ideal, rather than perfect candidate.

This simple tool, available for free on my website, works by differentiating between qualities a successful employee must have and qualities you'd like an employee to have. For example, a call center employee must have the ability to effectively communicate with customers over the phone. It would be nice if they also had experience using the call center's customer relationship management software, but this isn't essential since training is available to new hires. 

The worksheet helped my client realize they had confused wants with needs. They wanted someone with outstanding technical skills, but technical skills weren’t essential to the job. They were hiring a manager, not a technician, so what they really needed was someone with enough technical knowledge to effectively manage their team.

Assessing organizational fit
In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins famously suggested that successful companies focus on getting the right people on the bus. The worksheet helps you go beyond job-specific criteria and identify what type of person would be a great fit with your organization. In other words, who are the right people for your bus?

In my client’s case, they realized that the only way to find someone whose salary expectations fit their budget was to find a manager who was truly passionate about their mission. Further analysis revealed that all of their successful employees had this trait in common, regardless of position.

Success!
My client was able to hire a manager to fill their open position within days of redefining their purple squirrel. Best of all, they were really excited about the person they'd hired and didn't feel as though they had settled on someone who wasn't qualified.

Check out this short tutorial video below if you'd like to see how this tool works (click here if the embedded video doesn't appear). When you are ready, you can download the worksheet and give it a try.

The trouble with magic metrics

Executives like the idea of using a single magic metric to evaluate customer service because it’s so simple. “Do well at this,” the thinking goes, “and you’re doing well.”

Unfortunately, the real magic happens when you start peeling back the layers of your data to find out what’s really going on. If you look carefully at so-called single score metrics like the Net Promoter System, you’ll realize the score is just a starting point for evaluation. It’s the underlying analysis and continuous drive to improve that’s really important.

For example, a few months ago I blogged about my experience with Verizon’s Global Traveler Program. I’d rate my likelihood to recommend their service as a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, but this rating doesn’t reveal that my score is really a sum of good, great, and poor experiences. A closer look at experiences like mine is needed for Verizon to clearly understand how to make their service truly exceptional while cutting down on costly calls to technical support.

Not All Promoters Are Loyal
I really enjoy reading the Wall Street Journal. Their informative articles help me stay on top of the news I care about while their style really captures my attention. I follow them on Twitter to get the latest updates on their news coverage and I consider it a plus when I stay at a hotel that provides free copies to their guests.

So why did I recently cancel my subscription?

Simply put, subscribing to the Wall Street Journal had become a hassle. You could classify me as a “Promoter” if you used a Net Promoter System because I would certainly recommend that you read their news coverage. However, I’d give the Wall Street Journal low marks on the amount of effort required to subscribe to them via my iPad.

Customer Effort Score
One of the latest magic metrics to gain popularity is called the Customer Effort Score. It essentially gauges how easy or difficult it is to do business with a company. According to research published by the Corporate Executive Board, Customer Effort is a better predictor of loyalty than a Net Promoter Score.

Reducing effort is where the Wall Street Journal could have saved my business. I subscribed via my iPad because I liked the promise of reading the paper wherever I went and getting updated content throughout the day. However, they frequently released updates to their iPad app, which meant that I couldn’t read the paper until I performed the update. This got more and more annoying until I finally decided the price of the subscription wasn’t worth the extra effort.

Ironically, cancelling my subscription also required more effort than necessary since the only way to cancel a subscription is to call. Their website states this is for security reasons, but the truth is they want to take one more shot at keeping your business by making you speak to a retention specialist.

So, just make things easy, right?!
Not so fast. Let’s compare one of my favorite examples, McDonalds vs. In-N-Out Burger. Getting a burger at McDonalds is relatively easy. The drive-through line moves pretty quickly and most orders placed at the counter are delivered almost instantly. On the other hand, there’s always a wait to get your food at In-N-Out.

If we judged the two by Customer Effort alone, McDonalds would win hands down. The problem with that assumption is that you’d then be stuck with a McDonalds hamburger which consistently scores poorly in consumer taste tests. As legions of devoted In-N-Out fans will tell you, getting a tasty In-N-Out burger served by a cheerful employee in a clean store is absolutely worth the extra effort.

There Are Three Kinds of Lies
One of my favorite quotes is from Mark Twain:

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

My take-away is data can be very useful, but it can also obscure the truth. Customer service metrics like Net Promoter Score or Customer Effort Score are fantastically useful tools, but achieving a certain score should never be the ultimate goal.

If all you want to do is achieve a certain Net Promoter Score, I can show you a dozen tricks to make that happen. For instance, one enterprising store manager at the Gap offered a 20% discount in exchange for a 10 on their Net Promoter survey. That will certainly improve the score but not necessarily the service.

The most successful companies first ask, “How can we do better” and then find the right data to help them continuously improve.

Find Your Lagniappe

Marketing expert Stan Phelps wrote about the concept of a lagniappe in his book, The Purple Goldfish. 

Technically, "lagniappe" means a small gift given to a customer at the time of purchase. Phelps broadens this to mean an "unexpected surprise that’s thrown in for good measure to achieve product differentiation, drive retention, and promote word of mouth."

Here are just a few examples:

• Customers at Jason's Deli can always treat themselves to free ice cream.
• Any part under $1 is given away for free at Zane's cycles.
• When you buy a suit at Men's Warehouse, you can always get it pressed for free.

So, what low cost and simple lagniappes will delight your customers?

Debunking the myth that attitude is a choice

You may have heard the story about a Subway employee who lost his job after getting into a confrontation with a customer over ketchup.

The short version of the story is a customer ordered a Philly cheesesteak sandwich with ketchup and an argument ensued when the employee insisted that Subway didn’t have ketchup. It nearly escalated into a physical altercation and the police were eventually called to the scene.

It’s tempting to look at the situation and conclude that the employee chose the wrong attitude.

If only it were that simple.

The truth is our attitudes can be trigged by involuntary or even unconscious emotions. Yes, there are still choices involved, but the choice is what we do next once we recognize these sour emotions within ourselves. The Subway employee lost his job because he didn’t make the right decisions once his bad attitude emerged.

Emotional Hijacking
I interviewed a nightclub employee named Paul while writing my book on hidden obstacles to customer service. One of the stories he shared was a telephone encounter with an angry customer who called to accuse a server of stealing his credit card number. Despite years of experience in hospitality, Paul found himself struggling with his emotions:

“I could feel my blood pressure going up. I could feel my face get flush. I felt like, ‘Don’t accuse my co-worker of doing something that you don’t know that they did.’ There was a million ways that credit card numbers get stolen. It was so frustrating to me.”

Paul knew the right thing to do was to project a calm and empathetic demeanor, but he struggled with this common sense because his emotions were running high. The customer’s pointed accusations caused Paul to experience what’s called an emotional hijacking, a situation where the emotional center of our brain becomes so consumed with powerful emotions that it temporarily takes over our ability to reason.

Unlike the now infamous Subway employee, Paul made the correct decision once he was aware of his negative emotions. He reminded himself to stay calm, took down the customer’s information with a promise to look into it, and quickly got off the phone before he lost his cool.

Unconscious Emotions
As hard as it may be to believe, there are times when we aren’t consciously aware of the emotions we are experiencing. In his book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman likens this to a “social virus” where emotions are spread undetected from person to person.

These unconscious emotions can negatively affect a person’s body language and tone of voice. These are two of the most important ways we communicate our attitudes to others, so a customer service employee who is “infected” can signal customers that they are in a bad mood without fully being aware they feel this way.

Viewed from this perspective, expecting a customer service employee victimized by unconsciously communicated emotions to remain happy and upbeat is like trying to avoid getting the flu. You can take precautions to guard against it, but there’s no guarantee that you won’t be infected.

Fortunately, both positive and negative emotions can be unconsciously contagious. Positive employees naturally cause their co-workers to quickly recover from negative emotions. Happy customers also influence the people who serve them to do better. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to provide great products and services backed by customer-friendly policies that are less likely to create angry customers in the first place!

Conclusion
It can be a challenge for customer service employees to effectively manage their emotions, but it gets even more difficult when all they get from their supervisor is an admonition to avoid taking it personally. Employees need coaching and encouragement to continuously project the positive attitude their customers expect.

Share customer feedback

If you interact with a lot of customers you probably hear plenty of stories. Good, bad, and sometimes ugly. The point is, a lot of valuable customer feedback comes to you that could be used to improve your company's products and services.

Here are some things you can do with customer feedback:

• Keep track of common complaints and share them with your boss, the product development team, or anyone else who can make a difference.
• Pass along compliments to your co-workers so they know they've made an impact. 
• Encourage customers to complete customer satisfaction surveys

The Preemptive Acknowledgement

Updated: June 30, 2023

The Preemptive Acknowledgement can help you prevent a customer from getting angry.

This technique is the customer service professional's secret weapon against negative emotions. It's very simple to understand, but spotting situations where you can use it effectively can take a little practice.

Here's how it works:

Step 1: Spot a problem before the customer gets upset.

The key here is to spot the problem before the customer has a chance to complain. (Once the customer gets angry you'll no longer be able to use the Preemptive Acknowledgement.) For example, you might notice a customer who has been waiting in line or has been on hold.

Step 2: Acknowledge the situation before the customer complains.

You can do this by apologizing, demonstrating empathy, or thanking the customer for their patience. This acknowledgement often preempts the customer's complaint or anger and shows that you care about their experience.

Step 3: Re-focus on a solution.

Re-direct the interaction to focus on a solution rather than the problem. For example, you might say, "Thanks for waiting so patiently. Let's get you taken care of!"

This short video shares more and includes an example of this technique in action.

Preventing negative emotions from Customer Service Foundations by Jeff Toister and Madecraft

The video is from my Customer Service Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning. You can find my entire list of customer service training videos here.