Reaction Culture In a Service Economy
Have you ever avoided a conversation, speaking up in a meeting, or taking a call from a customer because you’re anticipating a harsh undesirable reaction? Does your workplace have a reaction culture?
Reaction Culture
In the reaction culture, our plan is to wait for something to break. We wait for the compliant, the problem to arise, or the shipment to be unsatisfactory. The assumption often is, no news is good news.
When a problem occurs we send it to the customer service department, or we call one ourselves when we are the victim. We wait for people to look for us, hunt us, and track us down. Everything else, well, it is just good news, not bad.
Our reaction then, is probably to avoid bad news. Avoid the compliant, avoid the problem, and hope that good enough will be exactly that, good enough.
May be that isn’t the right tactic. Reactionary isn’t the right approach for communication, it doesn’t spell leadership, and it certainly is probably not the best resolve for customer interactions.
Proactive Is Lucrative
It seems to me that proactive is much more lucrative. Customer service should be about a proactive culture of service. It is not a department, and it certainly shouldn’t be only about a transaction gone wrong.
What if the metric was tallied differently, what if it was not about problems fixed but more about problems never occurring?
What if the sign on the wall in the plant was a count of how many days without a reported customer problem? Safety matters, but so does the customer, without them there isn’t a plant at all.
Labeled As Good
When we make customer service about a department it places the weight of everything on a reaction and making things just good enough.
It seems to me that there is a difference between good enough and being enough to be labeled good.
Proactive is a better choice, it is much different from the reaction culture.
– DEG
Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSPTM), and corporate trainer that specializes in helping businesses and individuals accelerate their leadership, their team, and their success. He is a five-time author and some of his work includes, #CustServ The Customer Service Culture, and Forgotten Respect, Navigating A Multigenerational Workforce. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.
