Avoiding Customer Service Minefields
Last year I was teaching a customer service class to a group of United Nations supervisors in Italy. I had people in my class that were involved in peacekeeping missions in some of the most violent countries on earth. And still, customer service was important. The people on the front lines that are directly involved in peacekeeping need good service from their internal UN support groups to be effective at their jobs. And, they deserve it. I learned a few things first hand about the UN and the people that work there:
- I came to the conclusion that the United Nations, as an organization, has the most difficult job in the world. They are a peacekeeping organization, and as such, tackle some of the most challenging problems of our time.
- All of the people I personally met that were working for the UN, without exception, were highly competent, motivated and dedicated.
- What they do is necessary and under appreciated.
So where am I going with this minefield thing? A UN person mentioned to me that he was involved in a workshop designed to build on the work of others and to avoid mistakes that were already made. The metaphor for this was a minefield. That is, in business and customer service, don’t go into the “minefield” that others have already proven is dangerous. Build on previous work and learn from mistakes already made. In the workshop, teams would lose points if they repeated a mistake that another team made (that is, stepped in the same minefield that someone else already determined was dangerous). This encourages cooperation and communication between different teams. (…we tried this or that but it didn’t work because … then we tried… and that worked.)
By the way, while in the process of writing this little article I discovered http://www.landmines.org/. According to the site, there are between 70 and 80 million landmines in the ground in one-third of the world’s nations that maim or kill 15,000 to 20,000 civilians every year. This organization helps to remove the mines and provide assistance to the survivors - a great cause regardless of your politics. As soon as I discovered this organization I was compelled to make a donation. After all, the victims are somebody’s customers and we can’t be blowing our customers up, can we?
