问答题
.It's the first rule of customer service: When something goes wrong, apologize. In many cases, the apologies continue throughout the interaction as an employee goes the extra mile to convey empathy and concern. But surprising new research shows that approach can backfire: An apology that extends beyond the first seconds of an interaction can reduce customer satisfaction. Employees should instead focus on demonstrating how creatively they are trying to solve the customer's problem—that is what drives satisfaction.
Researchers reached these insights via a novel study that allowed them to observe exactly what happens when a customer rep is confronted with an unhappy customer. A team led by Jagdip Singh obtained and analyzed 111 videos filmed at customer service desks at U.S. and UK airports for a reality TV show. The clips depict employees dealing with passengers who have lost bags, missed flights, or suffered other indignities of air travel. "For the first time we were able to go beyond surveys or after-the-fact interviews and get direct access to the way these interactions happen in real life," says Singh.
The researchers coded employees' words and phrases, evaluating whether the reps were engaged primarily in "relational work" or in "problem-solving work". They also examined facial expressions to identify when employees were showing "positive affect"—for example, by smiling. The study reached two broad conclusions. Employees who expressed a great deal of empathy or tried to appear bright and cheerful did a poor job of satisfying customers. And customers cared less about the actual outcome than about the process by which the employee tried to offer assistance.
To explain these counterintuitive findings, the researchers point to leadership studies that have found a trade-off between perceptions of warmth and perceptions of competence. They hypothesize that the same phenomenon exists in service recovery: If employees project a lot of warmth, customers perceive them to be less competent. When analyzing the videos, the researchers divided the customer interactions into three phases: sensing, seeking, and settling. In many of the encounters, reps kept apologizing or making small talk throughout all three phases, but their attempts at warmth seemed only to heighten customers' frustration. "Saying 'I'm sorry for this—the same thing happened to my sister' makes the customer feel that the employee is not really paying attention to the problem," says Singh. In fact, the research suggests that continuing to apologize after the first seven seconds of such a conversation will most likely backfire.
After those opening seconds, the researchers say, employees should focus on energetically and creatively exploring a range of potential solutions to the problem. This brainstorming phase is what customers will use to assess the encounter—and the more ingenuity an employee shows, the better. To more fully understand the results of the video study, the researchers conducted a follow-up lab experiment using 568 people who had flown in the previous two years. Each participant listened to a scripted recording of an airline customer-service interaction involving a lost bag or a missed flight. In every instance the resolution was fairly negative. The encounters varied according to the precise words and process used by the frontline employee. The participants were asked to assign a customer service rating (on a one-to-seven scale) as if they had been the passenger. The results showed that customer satisfaction was highest when the employee had offered a variety of solutions, even if the outcome wasn't ideal
This research may lead companies to focus less on the personalities of frontline workers and more on the problem-solving process workers employ. Seven common personality types of customer reps identified, finding "Controllers"—outspoken, opinionated reps who are inherently driven to direct customers toward a solution—to be the most effective type. But Singh's research suggests that companies may benefit more from teaching employees to find imaginative answers to service problems than from refining their hiring profiles.
Not surprisingly, the study has sparked interest among hotels, restaurants, and travel-oriented companies; all operate in logistics-intensive industries where problems are rife and the consequences of a service failure can be significant. Singh says that companies have begun asking for suggestions about words or phrases employees can use to convey that they are energetically trying to solve a customer's problem. But it's impossible to script these encounters, he says—indeed, part of what makes service recovery so difficult is that it requires improvisation, because aspects of every issue are unique. So instead of obsessing over the perfect language to use, employees should learn to dive in. "Just get into the task and generate interesting options for the customer—that makes all the difference," Singh says.