The size of the workplace is typically proportional to the amount of red tape and dumb rules in place that prevents good customer service from happening with each customer interaction.
Dumb customer service rules and pointless, useless hoops are some of the main sources of frustration and disappointment for customers today. Unfortunately, it’s not only your customers who suffer, but your employees too.
People hate pointless rules and “policies” that don’t make sense. You anger customers, and you destroy employee morale when you force people to just do it because “it’s the way it has always been done”.
Usually these dumb customer service rules and policies aren’t yours, they’re from previous managers who probably ran into some issue and thought it was a good idea to paint a useless rule to affect everybody, just to take care of one potential future situation. If you want to be perpetually stuck in bad customer service land, keep things just as they are, otherwise, these useless customer service rules have to go.
It’s not hard to break the cycle of bad customer service rules and useless company policies.
1. Question everything you and your team does.
Any task, function, assignment that is currently being done needs to be reviewed and evaluated. Our team improved our efficiencies and turn-around times to our customers by 50% in 9 months by simply dropping some tasks that didn’t really matter to our customers.
2. List all tasks, policies, and procedures that are redundant.
Re-use work as much as possible. Often times we get stuck into operating procedures that make for redundant tasks. Look at what you’re trying to accomplish and cut out everything that is already being done somewhere else. If certain portions of work are repetitive, use macros, hotkeys, shortcuts, auto features to make work slicker, quicker, and more efficient.
What’s your take? How does your organization compare on the red-tape scale when it comes to customer service rules?
WinTheCustomer. is a premier customer service management blog. Flavio is a featured Customer Service blogger. Successful organizations embrace, live by, and innovate in awesome customer service, amazing customer experience, unique customer interaction and customer delight.
