A Different View on Customer Service for Small Business
by Stuart Livesey
Yesterday I went into the bank to deposit some cheques from overseas. That’s a two-step process in the bank that we use. First you go to the customer service counter where an officer processes the cheques and gives you a credit slip for each cheque. Then you take those credit slips over to the teller and they’re deposited into our account.
It’s usually pretty seamless and just about everyone in the bank knows us because we do it several times a week and have been for years. But yesterday the wheel fell off when the customer service officer who was processing the cheques made a major mistake that neither she nor I noticed at the time.
However I did notice it by the time I got to the teller because the credit slips added up to far more than what they should have. I pointed that out to the teller and she took me back to the customer service counter. The assistant manager happened to be standing there as we arrived.
A discussion ensued on the best way to solve the problem and it was agreed that they would correct the error and put the correct deposit through later in the day. It was no big deal for me, I knew they would fix it and I was perfectly happy for the deposit to go in later but you could almost see the fear in the eyes of the assistant manager.
Here was what she thought was an unhappy customer standing in front of her in a busy bank full of people. Was I about to get angry? Was I about to make a scene? Actually I lost count of the number of times I smiled at her and told it was all ok, I think she still expected me to start yelling and stamping my foot.
I don’t think she saw anything positive in helping people who had problems - for her it was something that had to be done and done quickly before they made a scene. Yet there are a lot of positives that can come out of customer service … if it’s done right.
And if you want to see a different way for large or small business to do customer service right then read Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service by Joel Spolsky. It’s quite a long read but there are some real gems to be found in what he writes.
And the original cause of the problem with our bank? The way Americans write the date is different to the way the rest of the world writes it and we had a cheque drawn by an Australian client on his American bank account that was dated the way we write the date. But an American would read that date as something quite different and a date that had not yet arrived.
A hat tip to Seth Godin’s Blog for the link to the article
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Stuart, I’m in Perth W.A. and have been taking U.S. cheques into Westpac since 1997. I have experienced the same as you speak of… reverse-looking dates and even tellers who are reluctant to do the manual work involved with my US ‘checks’. Dan Kennedy is great on customer service and says there was an opportunity missed by the asst. manager to ’shake your hand and thank you Stuart for your long-standing export business’ or similar.
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:32 pm
G’day Geoff
We’ve been pulling in cheques from the US since 1998 (ah those heady days of 50 cents) and we’ve only ever used one bank and two branches and we can’t speak highly enough of the staff of the Commonwealth Bank in Kingston Tasmania and Hervey Bay in Queensland.
They really have looked after us and, as you would expect in what is basically a small town, we often bump into the staff while shopping or other social occasions and it’s like meeting old friends.
On at least three occasions now we’ve fronted up to the counter and found ourselves being served by people who have never handled overseas cheques before. When they have then turned to one of the regular staff, who knows us, for help they’re usually told just to let us walk them through the process