The Blame Game

Along with death and taxes another sure fire cert is that if you give people a chance to complain, they will take it as swiftly as a New Zealand rugby player intercepts a poor pass. New media has only made this worse – or rather taken it to a new level. I mean, how many reviews on TripAdvisor can you really trust? Because, let’s face it, there are plenty swivel eyed loons only too happy to put the boot in because someone put their butter pat on the wrong side of the breakfast table, or their toast was just slightly the wrong shade of perfection.

Take the guy on the top deck of the bus with me this morning. He was asked to show his Oyster pass – and objected that he’d already done so downstairs and wasn’t going to do it again. Well, maybe he had a point – but he didn’t half labour it. No doubt he was quickly telling his ‘fans’ via Twitter that the police state is alive and well and the boot of Fascism firmly poised over the smiling face of innocent society. The guys checking the passes handled it well. It’s amazing how far a smile and a laugh and an apology can get you, even with a sour faced git…but there does seem to be to be a growing prevalence in our society to make being grumpy the accepted norm and new media, I believe, has turned this into a twisted art form.

Perhaps we are going to have to accept that we are living in the Age of Complaint. This may have to temper how ‘customers’ are in future handled. You have to admit that when things do go wrong it’s all too easy to join the blame game – and if a company is serious it should learn from these experiences and do better next time. But wait a minute – good old Murphy’s Law is another certainty in life – if it can go wrong, it will – which means that being prepared to put it right should be a given. Yes, customer service is critically important – but things will go wrong – and perhaps we’ve forgotten in striving so hard to please that we simply can’t get it right all the time. Perfection in business is an impossibility. But by persuading people that it is an attainment worth chasing we’ve set up an expectation in the customer’s mind that it exists – and when it doesn’t – even in the smallest detail – they reach for the closest social media outlet and let rip.

I have no scientific evidence to back this up, but my guess is that customer satisfaction figures will never ever achieve perfection. The more you try to drive them above, let’s say, 80 per cent the more they fail to reach it – because every time you improve one thing another (probably unexpected element) will fail. And each improvement pushes the bar of customer expectation higher and higher. That’s as it should be, but we should also be realistic about mistakes – and plan to address them and the poor saps on the receiving end. Because if we don’t, they will be only to happy to point out the errors to everyone on the planet they can reach – and these days they can reach a lot of people and very quickly – and add a video of the ‘incident’ they took on their mobile phone!

Finally, in our service-based economy, this all makes it harder still for those on the front line who have to deal with what goes wrong. And let’s face it, the people this hits hardest are usually the lowest paid frontline staff – the ones facing people directly when their flight is cancelled again, their chicken Kiev undercooked, their weekly supermarket shop needs to be re-scanned, or someone innocently and politely asks to see their bus pass one more time. We expect them to be able to cope with all expectations – and be little ambassadors for our businesses. But we pay them in brass washers while urging them to rise to every challenge they face – and achieve the impossible – make our customers into smiley happy people – and they themselves stay smiley and happy while they do it. As Amazon has seemed to prove, you can push your staff only so far before they too reach for the anonymity of social media and hit back. A recent survey in HR Magazine shows that 73 per cent of employees expect their stress levels to rise – and 86 per cent have taken things out on a fellow employee. That’s not good. And it’s certainly not good business. The Blame Game is well and truly here to stay – but until we accept that fact and get real about how to handle it, it can only get worse.

Nigel Lawrence