Why do customer service reps give out bad information?

As a customer, do you ever feel like you're stuck in an old-timey comedy routine?

My wife, Sally, and I recently had one of those experiences. Ironically, it happened while we were lining up to get into a comedy club.

An employee approached us. "You’re in the wrong line," he said. "Get in that line," pointing to another queue of customers.

So we dutifully followed his directions.

"This is the wrong line," said another employee “You need to be in that line,” pointing back to the line we just came from.

"We were just in that line," we replied. "Your coworker told us to get in this line."

"He does't know what he’s talking about. I know what I'm talking about. Get in that line."

Confused, we started going back to the first line when a third employee intervened. "No, get in that line," he said, pointing to yet a third line.

By now, Sally and I were starting to wonder if we were on some sort of hidden camera prank show. Why are there so many lines? Are they just messing with us?

Sadly, no. The comedy club employees were just giving out misinformation. The big question is why do customer service employees routinely do this?

What's the impact of giving customers bad information?

The salesperson confidently told a customer, "If anything happens, even if it just gets a scratch, the company will replace it, free of charge."

That bold claim was enough to convince the customer to make a purchase. The claim was also totally wrong.

The reality? If the product broke, the company would repair it free of charge. The customer felt cheated when they learned the warranty didn't extend to cosmetic issues like a scratch.

Customers can experience unnecessary misery when employees share misinformation.

It might be a bit of frustration, like the experience at the comedy club. It could be a true service failure, like a customer who believes a salesperson's false promise, only to learn the salesperson exaggerated to make a sale.

Sometimes, the consequences are tragic.

An airline passenger flushed her hamster down an airport toilet after a customer service rep mistakenly told her she could bring the hamster on the plane, only to get to the airport and learn the hamster couldn’t travel with her.

The impact of misinformation on the business can also be harmful:

• Increased customer complaints

• Lost business

• Negative word of mouth

Or in the case of one airline, national media coverage about its careless employees.

Why do employees give out the wrong information?

There are multiple reasons why an employee might give out false or misleading information to employees. Here are a few:

#1 Bad incentives

Employees are sometimes incentivized to lie. For instance, a retail salesperson might receive a commission if they bend the truth a bit to get a sale. They could be even more motivated to lie if they know they won't have to deal with any subsequent fallout.

#2 Overconfidence

Some employees overestimate their ability. A Cornell University study discovered that the less someone knows about something, the more likely they are to overrate their knowledge. A subsequent study from Yale found that people who can easily search for information on the internet also have an inflated sense of smarts.

#3 Bad data

Employees can sometimes give out the wrong information because their data source is wrong or out of date. For example, a technical support rep struggled to solve an issue with her company's app because her knowledge base hadn't been updated with information about the latest software release. So she had to rely on outdated information when trying to help customers.

#4 Bad mentors

The people employees trust, such as bosses and trainers, often give out false or misleading information, too. Early in my career, a mentor shared with me several statistics such as "55 percent of communication comes from body language." I later researched the origin of this claim and discovered it's totally false.

#5 Stress

People stop making great decisions when they are under stress. That's what happened at the comedy club. The previous show ran long and now the club was late getting people seated for the next show. This put employees in the weeds, where nobody knew exactly what to do, but everyone felt they had to do something to keep the line of people steadily moving into the club.

How can you improve information quality?

Companies can use several strategies to make sure employees are giving customers accurate and truthful information.

#1 Simplify

Reduce the number of places employees have to look for information. For instance, one company used a comprehensive elearning system to train employees on products and policies, but employees used a separate system on-the-job once their training was complete. The training system was often out-of-date, so the company solved the issue by using just one system for both training and on-the-job.

#2 Audit

It's helpful to audit the sources of information employees use to answer customer questions, especially when you encounter a service failure that happened because an employee gave a false or misleading answer to a customer. One option is a customer experience promise audit that reviews whether promises made by marketing, sales, and other departments are actually being kept.

#3 Reinforce

A great way to avoid misinformation is to constantly reinforce the correct information. Some customer service teams require reps to cite the source of an answer when sharing data with customers, such as a link to a knowledge base article. Other teams use team huddles and other information-sharing techniques to keep everyone updated.

Conclusion

Customers ultimately trust businesses that keep their promises. This includes sharing accurate information and setting clear, reliable expectations.

My book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience, outlines a process for creating experience guarantees that will help you win and retain more customers. You can get a free toolkit to help evaluate the promises you're making and ensure they're being kept.

Three Ways to Leverage Knowledge-Centered Service

A story about the tragic death of a pet hamster recently made national headlines.

Belen Aldecosea was traveling from Baltimore to Fort Lauderdale last November. She wanted to bring along her pet dwarf hamster, Pebbles, which she claimed was certified by her doctor as an emotional support animal.

When a Spirit employee told Aldecosea the hamster was not allowed to board the plane, Aldecosea flushed Pebbles down the toilet in airport restroom.

She claims she did this on the advice of a Spirit employee. Spirit adamantly denies any employee told her to do this.

Here's one thing that's not in dispute: Aldecosea contacted Spirit prior to traveling and was erroneously told by another employee that the hamster was allowed.

The stakes can be high when customer service employees are asked about seldom-referenced policies or obscure problems. They need access to the right information in the right place at the right time.

Here are three ways Knowledge-Centered Service can help.

Reduce Memorization

Knowledge-Centered Service, or KCS, is a process organizations can use to capture, structure, reuse, and improve critical information used to solve problems.

Reducing memorization is one clear benefit. Here's a short experiment to highlight a common challenge:

Name all of the planets in our solar system in order from closet to the sun to farthest.

Many of us will struggle to recall the first eight. There's controversy by the time we get to Pluto. Is it a planet or not? NASA's website is surprisingly unhelpful when it comes to settling this question.

We need clear, reliable information that's easy to find in situations like this.

One client of mine struggled to get employees to remember a three-step procedure for greeting office visitors via a security intercom system. They tried team meetings, emails, and written memos but nothing worked.

The solution was putting the right information in the right place at the right time. My client hung a sign next to the intercom with the three steps. Problem solved.

Another client struggled to get employees to remember complex technical information about the medical devices it sold. The solution was creating a single page with links to information sheets for each product so employees could quickly and accurately answer customer questions without memorizing the answers.

Shorten Training

If you're old enough, you grew up during a time when you memorized all of your friends' phone numbers.

Today, I can barely remember my own phone number. Important information about our friends such as phone numbers, birthdates, and addresses are all safely stored in our smart phones. 

It's a phenomenon called digital amnesia where we've become less adept at memorizing information.

That makes training much more difficult since traditional training often revolves around getting participants to memorize facts, procedures, and other information.

KCS can help solve that. Rather than memorizing piles of information, participants are taught to use a knowledge base to identify known solutions to problems. I've helped clients cut new hire training time by as much as 50 percent by switching from a memorization-focused training regime to a KCS approach.

The best part happens when new information is introduced.

Let's say your company releases a new product. You can do a short hands-on training meeting with the new product and capture everyone's questions into a searchable frequently asked questions (FAQ) document that anyone can access. 

Now your team can quickly recall what they learned about the new product and sound like an authority when answering questions just by accessing the FAQ. That FAQ can be updated and corrected as new insights are gained or you receive feedback from customers.

Improve Self-Service

Good self-service often runs on information, which means that self-service can fail when that information isn't readily available.

For example, some airlines allow passengers to book free stopovers. This is essentially an extra long layover that allows you to visit one city and then continue to another hours or even days later for the price of one ticket. 

Here's what happens when I search the Spirit Airlines website for information on stopovers. (Yes, I added the space on purpose.) 

Nothing useful here, not even a clear "we don't allow stopovers" policy. This will probably prompt a call to customer service if I wanted to find the answer.

A best practice is to routinely track what customers are searching for. So if you notice a lot of customers are searching for "stopover," "stop over," or even "layover" you can add a helpful resource that appears when a customer searches any of those terms.

Many customer service software providers have created an interim solution to help customers locate self-service. The Zendesk Answer Bot scans customer emails and intuitively suggests solutions before the customer hits send.

Conclusion

The principles around KCS have been around for a long time. I was first introduced to them 20 years ago and have seen first-hand how important knowledge is in the world of customer service.

You can read an overview of the KCS methodology here if you'd like to explore the topic further.