People @ Work

We used to talk a lot about how to provide excellent customer service.  When you’re running a business and you are processing, say, 250,000 transactions, you’re still going to have 25 unhappy people if you operate at a 99.99% satisfaction rate.  To that person, they don’t care that you got the other hundreds of thousands of transactions right – you have a failure rate of 100% as far as they are concerned.

What we used to remind ourselves was that people really don’t expect an immediate fix to their problem.  What they expect is two things:

• Acknowledgment that a problem exists
• To understand what you’re doing to fix it.

Any time we delivered on those two things, the customer’s attitude improved a lot and they usually expressed confidence that we would get the situation resolved.

The reason I bring this up is this morning’s report on our country’s mood:

U.S. consumers’ mood improved unexpectedly in March as confidence in government economic policy improved, but sentiment remained anemic overall and close to a record low, a survey showed on Friday.  “The one-month gain from February to early March in confidence in economic policies was the largest ever recorded,” the report said.

Nice way to end a week but not a shock to me.  What has happened?

• We’ve acknowledged that, to paraphrase some verbiage of a few months back, that the economy is NOT sound and
• We’ve seen a number of programs put in place to try and fix it.

Putting politics aside (please?), the point isn’t if the solutions will work or not.  Just as with our online commerce business, the mood improves as the problem is addressed.   Good business lesson to end the week.  When one is sweeping under the rug it should be to get dirt out, not to push problems in.  You can be very very good at what you do 99.99% of the time and still have problems.