Michel Hogan brand advocate and principal of Brandology has noticed and spoken about this with me in our video interviews, a trend she’s worried about that has been on the rise in the past few years.
It’s a rather creeping, annoying trend which on first appearances should lead to better overall customer service for all of us, but which Michel guesses may be at the heart of why service levels appear to be declining. The trend I’m skirting around, a bit loathe to mention is the rise of the customerzilla.
Now I must declare my hand and say that throughout the eight years I was supporting myself through university I worked customer service jobs – waitressing, bar attending, small business advising – you name it, I managed to meet every kind of loathsome customer you could imagine. And I met plenty of wonderful ones also.
What I noticed at the time though, was that there is just no pleasing some people and this is usually because the source of their disgruntlement has nothing to do with the service or products you are providing. Their dissatisfaction goes much deeper and a small problem they’ve highlighted, may or may not even be real, but serves more to give them an excuse to ‘pay out’ on someone who isn’t quite in a position to fight back.
I found myself with a number of these customerzillas, who in the male variety don’t mind groping and sleazing while they’re complaining, maybe thinking there might be some kind of unusual pay-off . In the female variety the customerzilla can be officious and overbearing and makes demands that are way beyond the scope of whatever it is she’s agreed to pay for. Strangely enough there are those that fool themselves that if they pay a small amount of money for something, that the person serving them has just sold their soul to them.
The customerzilla scares the hell out of you and demoralises your staff. Put some boundaries around customerzilla behaviour and adopt a customer charter for your business.
Fast forward several years and I’m a broadcaster/manager with ABC Radio and yet again we have customerzillas ringing the radio station complaining that they don’t like a presenter’s voice (usually female – complainees also usually female), don’t like their choice of words, picked up a pronunciation they believe is wrong etc etc. There is a whole group of people out there who in another life must simply have been English teachers (I have also been one and in reality not just my own mind, and think it the height of rudeness to go around correcting others. English in its current form is a language that is 1) not that long-in-the-tooth and 2) is dynamic and spellings, sayings and language conventions change.)
As an ABC Radio manager I got to see humanity at its best and worst. One of the most limiting things about working for a government-funded corporation is that, at the end of the day, the people who listen to your work get a sense that they own you. Now I was one that actually wanted some kind of more collaborative interaction with listeners and in a number of territories that I worked in, I worked really hard to institute a culture of regular talkback on the local morning program (the morning programs usually consisted of local interviews, colour pieces regular guests etc and were perfect for giving local listeners a say about things). Interaction is a really good thing in the broadcast area if presenter and callers are all willing to play by some simple rules. No name-calling, find something interesting to muse about rather than an emotional cathartic dump, honest accounts rather than emotionalising and blaming other parties. Really the list of rules is quite simple and it’s all about stating a personal view without offending or infringing on others. Talkback when it works, that is when you have really thoughtful, interesting and colourful callers can be outrageously good fun. It can broaden your perspective on an issue and reveal inconsistencies in a position that are not really obvious until you’ve heard multiple views on the matter.
But what is not fun is having a listener call the station manager simply because he/she wants to dump on someone.
Fast forward again to 2000 to 2006 when David and I started up and then grew the online business Arts Hub. In the early days, probably because we were so new and there was nothing else like us in the arts space, most of our members were simply wonderful. They’d ring to tell us they loved the service, didn’t agree on all the news stories (or did), but loved the fact that we ran different perspectives throughout the week and weren’t particularly biased or partisan in our reporting. Part of the editorial approach we decided on was to be a broad church so that all parts of the arts community could coalesce at Arts Hub. It was important to us that we reported industry issues comprehensively and from multiple perspectives.
In the 6 years we ran Arts Hub we had cause to sack about three customers. This was a really tough decision for David and I to come to as we really wanted all our members to enjoy being part of Arts Hub and to feel valued in the community. But as in the wider world, there are just some people for whom soft values don’t matter and issues of respect and courtesy just aren’t on their radar.
We had one member who made it her business to complain incessantly about the content we ran and would call up our staff and take up hours of time grilling them and being manipulative, accusatory and otherwise extremely difficult to deal with. After a number of such calls, a staff member came to me and explained what had been going on and I recommended no longer taking her calls but dealing with her complaints via email. This was actually a useful change of tack for us with this customer, although we continued to provide a full phone support service for every other member, this one now had to put her particular issues in writing and couldn’t just call us up to humiliate a well-meaning and helpful staff member. It also meant that David and I could be cc’d on the communications with this member and could see exactly what was going on.
When communication is in writing it’s so much easier to see that someone is being unreasonable and irrational and after several unacceptable written exchanges we decided that we did not want this member as a part of our community. We refunded the unused portion of her membership, killed her profile out of the membership database and emailed her to let her know she was no longer part of the Arts Hub community. I must admit to sleeping very badly for a few nights wondering what spiteful action this customerzilla would launch against the long-suffering staff member who’d taken her calls or myself. But as it was we never heard from her or about her again.
Customerzillas do exactly what that particular member did to me and to the staff member who bore the brunt of her negativity and disgruntlement. They unnerve you, they confuse you, they overwhelm you. Even if you know your product offering inside out, suddenly you find yourself unable to speak coherently about it because they’re on the rampage and it doesn’t matter what you do to try do to ameliorate them, they have decided they will not stop until they have blood.
Michel Hogan has thought long and hard about the customerzilla and she sees no place for them in business. But weeding out the customerzillas is a sensitive task and one that can leave everyone involved, bar the customerzilla, feeling exhausted, depleted and demoralized.
I’m with Michel when she says as a part of a company’s brand, it also needs a customer charter – that is a set of values and rules that it will hang its hat on and will always comply with. Within that charter though there is also the scope to set the boundaries on what exactly it is that the company is offering and what it is not – what it will and will not do for the customer. A public customer charter is going to set a few standards and maybe raise the bar within your business, but if it can also serve as a tool to set some limits on a customerzilla then surely it must be a good thing? After all aren’t most of us in the business of serving well the customers who actually want/need and appreciate our products and services?
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