By J. Dean Spence
Okay, okay I admit it. In the past I have been one of those exacting frontline customer service workers who are sticklers for the rules. You know the type: “No, you can’t use the bathroom without first buying something to eat or drink!” or “I’m sorry you can’t get your money back without a receipt—even though you were here less than an hour ago and I distinctly remember you!”
As a customer service worker with such spiritless tenacity, I have often been met with the look (“What an f—ing prick”).
When you work in hospital frontline food service (meal tray delivery), you are given a few rules that could possibly save the lives of patients. For example, it’s not our job to fetch water for patients because we don’t know who is on fluid restrictions. And, we can only give those patients the food that is on their trays—if they want something extra, patients have to tell their nurse and the nurse has to call the diet office and the worker there has to check the patient’s diet restrictions, and then someone has to prepare the food in the kitchen, and finally someone like me has to deliver it to the patient. It is a time-consuming process. If I were to grab the food on my own and give it to the patient, it would be quicker but I could unwittingly give the patient food that harms them. It’s difficult to explain all of this to a hungry patient who just wants to nibble on a cracker.
However, on occasion when I sense that the rules are just too rigid I have broken them much to the delight of the people I have served. Once, a patient wanted an extra ice cream and I got it for her only because her nurse, who was in the room with us, said it was okay. I figured that if the nurse was alright with it, the ice cream wouldn’t kill the patient. However, if the nurse wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have gotten it for the patient.
Increasingly, organizations are becoming more customer-centric. In fact, John H. DiJulius, in The Customer Service Revolution, argues that we are, in fact, in a customer service revolution. Good customer service not only helps create a strong relationship between an organization and its customers, but it also helps customers gain the full use and advantage of an organization’s offerings.
And, of course, at the frontlines of this relationship building are the workers who have direct contact with customers.
Customer relationship marketing (CRM) fits right in with the idea of a customer service revolution. According to Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in Managing Customer Experience and Relationships, CRM is “the activities and processes a company must engage in to manage individual relationships with its customers.” A key tenet of CRM as Peppers and Rogers teach it is developing a “learning relationship” with customers: “The basic strategy behind Learning Relationships is that the enterprise gives a customer the opportunity to teach it what he wants, remember it, give it back to him, and keep his business.”
Some people describe CRM as a philosophy, and like most philosophies CRM’s teachings are fluid and can be adapted to varying situations. Which brings us back to those rigid rules I wrote about above. Frontline workers must follow certain business rules, and in a hospital setting following those rules can be a matter of life or death. Peppers and Rogers describe business rules as “The instructions that an enterprise follows in configuring different processes for different customers, allowing the company to mass-customize its interactions with its customers.” So, by all means, at the hospital we want to offer patients the food that they like, but there are correct processes for workers to follow to ensure that, for example, a patient doesn’t get food that he or she is allergic to.
In the example above, in which I gave the patient some ice cream without following the rules, I used my judgment. (Not that my motives were purely professional—the nurse was curiously good-looking and part of me wanted to score points!) Peppers and Rogers suggest the obvious, in their book, that people working in the frontline need to be empowered to use their judgement when they are in these types of situations. Rigidly following the rules all the time can only hurt the relationship between an organization and its customer.