On my way home yesterday, I swung by the Brooklyn Public Library which has been doing much better in the customer service department since my initial encounter while getting a library card.  I mostly just go there to pick up holds.  I picked up my book and went to the checkout and greeted the clerk who returned my greeting.  After swiping my card and checking out my material, she said, “Wait” and then looked at my pile.  “You have two other books on hold.  Let me check the back.”  This is excellent customer service.  I know that after checking me out she checked my record and saw the holds.  Some clerks do not do this and then you get home to an email saying your books are ready.  All in all the folks at BPL have been much friendlier and helpful and I now look forward to going in there.  Lesson:  Take the extra second (or longer) to provide thorough service.

I’m starting to think the mess over signing up for a card was just a fluke, though they still have my address wrong and I’m not about to correct it because it’s a hassle, which brings me to another lesson learned:  keep it simple.  The policy that I have to bring in proof of address AGAIN in order to correct the street number on my record, which I pointed out as an error is completely based on a system of distrust.  It’s no skin off my back if the number is right or wrong.  I don’t particularly want junk snail mail because I  subscribe electronically to the information I want to receive.  So, I’m not receiving any fund raising materials via snail mail, which would typically lie around my house before being tossed.  I’ve been known to give fundraising pleas a second chance after they have been hanging around the house for awhile.  Instead, because they won’t fix the address, they are only getting their pleas to my email inbox and I delete them immediately without reading.  Out of sight, out of mind.

As a customer of any business, when I sense policies and procedures set up because they don’t trust me and/or their own employees I can almost feel my loyalty to them fade away.  This happened with Whole Foods, where I do still shop from time to time but I really feel much less loyalty to them.

Brooklyn Public is a large system doing the best they can with a smaller budget (I’m guessing).  But their most valuable resource is sitting at the circulation and reference desks.  These are the folks that can build or break customer loyalty.  These are the folks that deliver first impressions good and bad.  How are you treating that resource?  Are you getting the best from staff?  Have you earned the best?

via Flickr Commons

I can already hear the groans.  I know very few people who enjoy going to a dealership or a used car lot to buy a car.  It seems so much more civilized to purchase from a private party.  But, if you need financing or want to test drive multiple cars at once or just appreciate how a car sales place will guide you through the insurance and registration part, you will have to deal with one of the most notoriously tainted negotiation processes you are likely to encounter in your life.  Even buying a house is more civilized than the gauntlet many car salespeople will put you through.

My car was past its prime.  I didn’t have the time or patience to drive all over the place looking at cars being sold by people; so, off to the dealerships I went.

I contacted them in two different ways:  either I stopped by after viewing inventory online or I used a virtual method (chat/email/form) after viewing online inventory.  Let me preface this by giving you some background: I used my librarian skills to do research on the various vehicles that fit my needs and narrowed it to looking at small, used, economical hatchbacks and then narrowed it further by excluding some manufacturers based on reliability reports.  Also, I’m a car person raised in a car loving family.  I spent my childhood in garages handing my father wrenches and getting lectures on the proper way to adjust a carburetor.  I’m familiar with the lingo, the sales tactics and generally feel at home in any kind of vehicle related place.

I went in wondering if I could learn anything about customer service that could be applied to the library world and wondering if anything had changed since I last bought a car from a dealership.

This is what I found:

Even after being very open and specific about my needs and exactly what I was looking for in my next vehicle, every single person except for the salesmen I eventually bought from tried to steer me to a sedan because even if they had a hatchback it didn’t satisfy other requirements like price or mileage.  I spent 5 minutes explaining to one salesman why I was unwilling to purchase a higher mile car.  He still didn’t get it and just continued to argue my reasoning.  I found myself actually arguing with salespeople over the reasons I wanted a hatch.  What I learned:  Listen, listen, listen.  What we offer our customers is free so we naturally tend to offer them alternatives to what they asked for but perhaps we should preface this with a statement like the following:  I understand you are looking for a specific book on subject X which we don’t have ;but, perhaps while you are waiting for your ILL to arrive you’d be interested in these other books which might include coverage of your topic.

They lie.  I’m sure they wouldn’t call it that; but, they really do lie.  They tell you one thing knowing another thing is true.  Or they tell you a song and dance about their manager which is really just part of the dance.  Learned:  We like to think we don’t lie to our customers; but, I can think of some specific times we evade the truth about policies or procedures.  There is a discomfort with telling a customer we discard books or we do something for our own convenience rather than theirs (a whole other post!).  Question:  If we have policies or procedures that embarrass staff or otherwise put them in the position of feeling like they have to evade answering, are we providing good customer service with these policies and procedures and are we setting our staff up to fail?

They tend to treat you like you don’t know anything.  Learned:  ask the right questions so you don’t have to assume what the customer knows or doesn’t know.

I was surprised that little had changed.  I got the run around.  I was made to wait.  Two places held my car keys hostage under the guise they were going to assess it for its trade in value.  I told the one guy, “Please don’t assume I haven’t noticed you still have my keys.”  His face turned red and he replied, “Let me go get them for you.”  At which time, the manager came out to talk to me.  I had to ask for my keys.   This sort of behavior is infuriating.  Are we infuriating our customers?  At my current library, we tend to avoid this result of a customer interaction.  I have worked at libraries that had fury inducing policies.

Finally, I landed in the hands of Al who answered my questions and was generally a pleasant guy to spend a couple of hours with while we test drove cars and filled out paperwork.  He returned my keys as soon as the mechanic was done assessing it.  He listened to me and worked within my constraints (I too can be a pain in the butt.).  I was honest with him and I felt that he was honest with me.  The only car salesmany thing he did was to open the windows of the first car which had a distinct mold smell. 

So, lets recap.  Lessons learned on the used car lot.

1. Listen. Listen. Listen.  Let the customer know they have been heard.  This not only helps the customer get the resources they need; but, it’s also effective in defusing the angry customer.
2. Avoid policies and procedures that put your staff in the position of feeling they can’t be honest.
3. Ask the right questions before assuming what your customer does or doesn’t know whether its about resources, library policies and practices or anything else.
4. Do you have policies that you know are irritating when they don’t have to be?  Do you have policies that could be changed but are in place for staff convenience at the detriment of customer service?  Change them.

If you’ve been reading CCS for awhile, you know I’m not big on blame.  I’m big on the seeing there is a problem and coming up with solutions part of assessing failure.

I am part of a listserv for my town.  Mostly I skulk, keeping up on local news and happenings from a homeowner’s perspective.  Recently there was an interesting discussion that was born out of a comment from a regular poster who informed the group that a local, boardwalk coffee/bakery shop had closed up.  He made an offhanded comment about commercial rents going up on the boardwalk and mostly talked about the importance of supporting small local business in our fledgling little seaside community.

After reading his post, I quickly had the following thought:  Dude, rent had nothing to do with the failure of that business and everything to do with the horrible customer service and pissy attitude of the owner. I decided to reply to his post with a couple of anecdotes of my own experience as a customer at this shop, which sparked a fascinating discussion and saw a flood of very civil posts about customer service and just how much people were willing to take in order to keep small business flourishing and when it became just not worth it.

This bakery by far had some of the best baked goods in NJ and probably one of the most divine macaroons I have ever eaten.  His coffee was mediocre; but, there is no great coffee in Asbury Park; so, that was not surprising.  But, this man, who owned the shop and worked behind the counter was just unpleasant, abrupt and on occasion, rude.  The last time I had been in there was early this summer when I had a guest visiting from Oregon and she said, “ooh a bakery.”  So, we went in.  There were two people ahead of us in line and one of them asked for iced coffee which he began to retrieve from a refrigerator.  As he held the door open he turned and said:  Does anyone else want an iced coffee while i’m over here?  He asked this question as if he was totally being put out.  When the shop fell silent, he said: I guess that’s what they mean when they call me the coffee nazi; but, it just makes sense if i’m over here anyway. My friend looked at me and I shrugged. We got our treats, which were delivered brusquely with no thank you and walked out.  My friend said, That was weird.  I replied: I know.  He’s always like that.  I almost never go in there.

Further down the boardwalk is a seasonal business called the Sandwitch.  The owner is funny, warm and kind and this is all delivered while under pressure because her business is thriving and there were always lines and 2 or 3 more workers crammed into her little hut making sandwiches and smoothies and coffee drinks.  I probably went there almost a dozen times until she closed for the season in October.

I want to support small business in my community.  I’d rather give my $$ to a person taking a risk on my town, contributing to it’s renaissance and what we in Asbury Park call, Buying In.  But, you gotta give me something.  Even a robotic thank you would have helped me support this guy.

And now I’m back to the concept of blame.  Apparently this owner believes that his business didn’t survive the economy, or at least that was what he said on the listserv.  But, that is just not true.  Here in Asbury Park we broke beach attendance records by something like 40% and my neighbor said she hadn’t seen the boardwalk as packed as it was on July 4th since the 6os, before AP’s decline.  And to top it off, his product was excellent.   New Jersey has a small but loyal foodie base that will get in their cars and travel for good food and their word on chowhound.com alone has probably saved more than one small business that didn’t get enough traffic the old fashioned way.  This is a case where blame really does lie at the feet of the proprietor and  if he can’t see where he went wrong I suggest he not try any more entrepreneurial pursuits.

It is important when there is failure to swallow pride and really SEE the failure.  Maybe it was just a bad idea.  Maybe the key people were just not in roles they can succeed in.  (The owner of the bakeshop put himself in the number one customer service role: counterman; but, he couldn’t meet the challenge.  He should have hired someone with better skills.)  Maybe you assumed too much about your customers.  Failure is the time when tough questions should be asked; but, it is also when the slate gets cleaned in a way that really innovative ideas can come out of the rubble.

If you roll out a new service in your library and it doesn’t get used or fails to meet projections, do you chalk it up as something the public just didn’t want or do you really assess the failure to find out exactly where you missed the target?  Just maybe, you learned something in that failure that will help you better serve your community.  Don’t assume, just because it’s a great service that they will come.  In my library, we are talking about ways to promote the Playaway collection (self contained audio books) because we just aren’t getting the circulation statistics we want.  We could just shut it down and reduce or eliminate the budget for them; but, maybe the failure is in our marketing  or education of the public.   Clearly we need to try a few things before giving up.  Shine the light on your process before blaming the public.  Bakery man might feel better about his failure if he blames the public:  they just didn’t come regularly enough to sustain this business; but, he might have learned more if he listened to his customers and read the online reviews of his business, which were almost all praising his product and slamming his service.

Get feedback from staff, from your customers, from anyone with an opinion and open your mind to it.  It’s okay to fail; but, get something out of it or it truly is just failure.

I bought a condo, exactly one week ago.  It’s always a little tricky dealing with mortgage brokers, lawyers, insurance agents, real estate agents.  Buying a home is really a logistical obstacle course of multiple hoops to jump through.  I’m not the greatest hoop jumper; but, I managed to pull it off and on time.

The fascinating thing about home buying, in relation to this blog, is the sheer amount of people you deal with who are providing you service at varying degrees of adequacy.  My team did okay.  There were a few times where I had to prod someone; but, heck, some of them had to prod me.

But, and there is always a but, at the closing, the buyers did not hand over keys because they had bought the unit at a foreclosure and claim that they never got any keys other than the unit key.  The customer service problems began to mount from this moment on.  I just bought a condo but did not have any keys to get into the building.  The realtor said she’d talk to the management company.  Two days passed and I had to access the building by calling ahead and having the realtor (who interestingly enough, lives in the building) or the super buzz me in.  This is a supreme hassle, especially since my parents came down to help me paint and get the condo ready to move in and they were actually staying there overnight.  It pretty much pissed me off and after two days and no key, I ran into our point person at the management company.  I politely introduced myself and told him that I needed the keys.  This man began an epic customer service fail that has yet to end.  Here is how he has handled my request.

• He abruptly told me, “I don’t have your keys” and to get the keys from my landlord.  The realtor jumped in and said, “She owns.”  She explained the whole foreclosure fiasco and how I basically received nothing at the closing.
• He sighed and looked completely irritated.
• He told me I had to pay 50 dollars for the missing keys.  I told him that no where in my contract did it say I would need to pay for keys.  He said, “You have to leave a key deposit.”
• He finally told me that he would give the super the keys that day.  He wrote down my name and phone number to put me into the security system so I could buzz people in. This took 3 1/2 days.
• I asked about parking and he said he’d put me on the waiting list which he has yet to do.
• I was still talking when he turned away to make a phone call unrelated to our conversation.
• He did not make the keys like he said he would.  So, I left a voice mail reminding him I needed the keys.
• My father left a note on his office door.
• I ran into him the next day and said, “Hey, I need the keys.”  He acted like he had NO idea what I was talking about.  I went through the whole story and he finally said, yeah…give me 20 minutes.
• 2 hours later, my father went to his office and demanded the keys.  The keys were given to my dad.

That would be the end of it except I still do not have keys for the storage unit or my mailbox and believe me, I do not look forward to hounding this guy just so I can get my mail.  And he misspelled my name on the directory even though I spelled it for him and watched him write it down.

This is the exact opposite of how this whole customer service interaction should have been handled.  I plan on being active at condo board meetings and my first question just might be, “Why are we still using this management company when they basically suck at customer service?”

Where does such poor service come from?  Boredom?  He was on his cell phone every time I encountered him.  Perhaps he doesn’t see his role as customer service. He definitely has the attitude that he is some sort of gatekeeper and we should be grateful that he does anything for us.  He was so bad at giving me customer service that it was almost absurd and definitely fodder for a painful sitcom situation.

The good news is that the super is one of the nicest, coolest guys I’ve encountered.  I ran into him outside one day and asked him how his day was going and he told me that he was having a good day and he was about to take “one of the old ladies” to the beauty parlor to get her hair done.  Now that is my kind of sitcom.  If you’re old enough to remember One Day At a Time, you’ll know what I mean.