Most people are prioritizing the wrong skills…
What do most people do when they become concerned about their personal safety?
Maybe they take a martial arts class. Buy a gun or knife. Take tactical shooting lessons. Work their way up to higher belts in karate or jiu jitsu.
And all of these things are fine. Good ideas, actually.
But talk to any real professional in this space, like bodyguards, or even (reformed) criminals, and they’ll tell you something else.
They’ll tell you stories about the guy who killed someone in a bar fight, or who broke into his home, and wound up in jail or facing huge fines.
They’ll also tell you about all the people out there who don’t know any martial arts. Who don’t carry any weapons. Maybe don’t even know how to use one.
But nobody messes with them.
Basically, they’ll tell you that all the classical Self Defense skills are very useful, and definitely have their place, but they are NOT your first line of defense.
If a guy tries to pick a fight with you in a bar or a parking lot, or wherever, are you better off beating his ass with your superior martial arts skills (if you’re lucky), or simply diffusing the situation verbally.
Better yet, would you be better off parking at the back of the parking lot and walking, rather than fighting over the closest spot? Or learning how to carry yourself so people don’t see you as a victim in the first place?
Experts unanimously recommend the latter. The fight that never happens is almost always better than the one you win. And it’s definitely better than the one you lose.
This makes logical sense to all of us, even if emotions in the heat of the moment whisper in your ear saying “Are you going to take that? Kick his ass!”
But here comes our old friend domain dependence…
We all know that avoiding a fight is generally better than getting into one.
But we all tend to assume that customer service begins when the customer comes to you with a problem or question.
This is like believing personal safety begins when you get robbed or punched in the face.
We think of customer service as the first line of defense. Really it should be the last resort.
Now obviously (hopefully) your customers don’t want to punch you in the face. But they might if you put them through the conventional customer service nightmare they’ve come to expect.
Press 47 for English, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” hold music, NPC agent asking you a bunch of pointless questions and reading from a script, no results of any kind until you get mad and demand a manager.
Terrible, but we’ve come to expect it.
As businesses, it’s time we get proactive about this. It’s time we take a page from the self defense and bodyguard community and make sure the “attack” never happens at all.
(Ask any long time call center NPC and they’ll tell you that a busy day there does feel like being under attack.)
With crimes, we do this by either making ourselves invisible to criminals, the so called “grey man,” or by making ourselves an unappealing target.
In customer service, we can’t hide, and intimidation doesn’t really work. We need the opposite approach.
We need to make sure our customers, as much as possible, never need to contact us about “routine” things.
If the majority of people wanted to harm you whenever they could, you’d never leave your home. So why do we accept making the majority of our customers contact customer service?
That’s why I write these posts. Why I send these emails. Why I make these videos. And why I created The 80/20 Service Guide.
It’s time to get smart about this.
To anticipate and prevent most problems before they happen.
To give our customers what they want and what they expect, and NOT to make them spend all their time chasing us down trying to get us to do what we should have already done anyways.
To remember the principles of 80/20 and focus on the most impactful actions first.
I walk you through all of it here.
— Mark
