The First Duty

Okay, before you ask, yes, I do know that the title of this post is also the title of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode; a rather good one that features the return of Wil Wheaton and the appearance of “My Favorite Martian” Ray Walston. But I’m a business teacher, not a fanboy, and this blog is about business, not science fiction. And in a business context, that First Duty to which I refer is the duty to listen to your customers, and hear what they are actually saying – not what you want them to say.

It’s one of those points that are so obvious that it can be difficult to understand why you have to explain it to anyone, and yet it is found at the heart of every major customer service training program. After all, the first thing every customer wants to know is that you are paying attention to them; that they matter to you and that you will try to solve their problem (at least to the extent that you can). This is particularly important in circumstances where the customer is having a problem with your company, your product, your inventory, or some other business factor that you can (at least in theory) control; at that point, understanding the problem and helping to resolve it is absolutely critical.

What is less often brought up about this function is its importance in situations where there isn’t a customer service problem – yet. Consider, for example, the situation we had today with our second car. My wife stopped driving it four years ago, mostly because of the ongoing mechanical problems with the engine, and also partly because she was able to join a shared ride van program and thus didn’t have to drive to work anymore. Not operating a second vehicle has saved us a small fortune on gas, repairs and insurance, but it has also resulted in our not using the car for several years. When we decided to part with it, my wife called one of those donate-your-car-to-charity groups and explained that they could have the car, but they would need to tow it out of our carport and up a short ramp to the street.

When the charity group came to take the car, they arrived in a four-vehicle transporter that could not handle anything that wasn’t parked on the street (instead of the tow truck we had asked them to bring). They could not get to the car, and had no interest in coming back with a more suitable tow vehicle. So we called an auto-wrecking service, explained to them in careful detail where the car was and what it would take to get to it, and asked them to come out with a tow truck…

You guessed it: they showed up with a large flatbed truck that couldn’t back up to our carport either! Fortunately, the guys driving the flatbed and I were able to push the car far enough out of the garage that they were able to get a tow chain on it and pull it the rest of the way. But they came very close to doing themselves out of a very large amount of business (thus violating the First Rule of Business); the charity people DID succeed in screwing themselves out of a donation worth hundreds (or thousands) of dollars. All because they were unable to listen to what was required of them.

Then there was the Verizon FIOS sales rep who called our house today. Despite the fact that our last name has only five letters in it, and despite the fact that I corrected her three times about how you pronounce it, she couldn’t get it right. But that pales in comparison to the fact that when I told her we were not going to purchase the service, she then asked when a good time to speak with Mr. or Mrs. Burke might be. I don’t know if she honestly didn’t think I was the person who lives at this phone number, or if she thought someone else in my household might give her a different answer, or if she got lost in her script and was reading the wrong response, or if she’s really stupid that despite being told our name is Belin (B-E-L-I-N, short E, short I) three times she couldn’t remember it. I do know that getting snotty with me at that point was possible the most pathetic customer service failure I have ever seen, as well as the most incompetent telephone sales effort I have ever witnessed…

And remember that I’ve worked in both customer service and phone sales over the years! If it was a failure to program a computer, operate a vehicle, or even memorize complex information and understand its significance, I could be more sympathetic. But in all of these cases, all the people in question were being asked to do was listen…