Leadership Lessons from Unexpected Customer Service

Like many of you, I started my week working from my home office. My day was unfolding in a typical fashion when all of a sudden, in the middle of an important meeting, I lost my internet connection.

Since I am an IT professional, I don’t immediately begin with the conclusion that the issue was caused by my internet service provider. I first eliminated the technologies that are in my direct control. I checked my computer, wireless access point, switch, and router. They all looked good, so I felt confident that the internet service provider was the root cause.

I opened the app on my phone that I use to self-serve my ISP account. Right at the top of the home screen, I saw this message:

Suspicion confirmed. This screen also gave me the option to enroll in text updates, which I did.

After that, I did my best to join meetings from my phone so I could stay productive during the outage.

A little while later, I looked out my window and saw this:

I received visual confirmation that someone was actively working on the problem. That made me feel good. Sure, my productivity took a hit, but there’s someone in a bucket truck working on it right now. I wasn’t being ignored.

A few minutes later, I noticed that the bucket was stowed, and the repair person was back in the cab of the truck. I also noticed that my internet service was restored.

I thought about going back to work to make up for lost time, but I decided to take an extra minute and walk out to the street to talk with the technician. I thanked him for his prompt repair. We exchanged a few comments about what happened. He told me it was all fixed and that I should be able to return to work without worrying about any more outages.

A few minutes after that, I received a text from the service provider:

You’ll notice that they allowed me to confirm that everything is working. Of course, they knew they fixed it. But it was nice that they gave me the option to confirm anyway.

The leadership lessons

As an IT leader, I live my life on the other side of this arrangement. I’m the service provider, not the customer. In this interaction, I got the customer experience. It was a good one, and we all can learn something from this. Here are my observations:

1. Rise above your reputation. ISPs are known for having terrible customer service. After decades of bad experiences, my expectations were pretty low. This provider could have met my already low expectations, but they delivered well above. As IT service providers to our business, we have the same opportunity, regardless of the past.
2. Detect. I didn’t need to tell my ISP about the outage. They already knew about it. I didn’t even need to navigate to the part of the self-service app where I’d log an issue. They pushed that message to me right on the home screen. Also, the fact that they detected it meant they were already on their way toward resolution. This started the clock faster than relying on me to report it after I eliminated the potential issues on my end.
3. Give an estimate, then beat it. Outages happen, but people want to have a rough idea of when things will be resolved so they can plan their day. Aim high, but within reason. The ISP could have estimated that it would be resolved in three days and that would have made me furious. A few hours was a reasonable estimate. Resolving it within an hour was quite remarkable.
4. Be visible. It felt good to see someone actively working on my problem. The pessimist in me wondered if my issue was just sitting in someone’s queue behind other priorities. I loved the visual confirmation that my issue was being addressed.
5. Follow-up. I figured out that my service was restored, but I appreciated the text letting me know that it was resolved. What if I had decided to run errands while my ISP was down? It would be good to know that I could return home. It also allowed me to confirm. It’s an act of humility and service to empower the customer to confirm that the issue is resolved from their perspective.

Those are my leadership lessons. This was a good experience. It also served as a powerful reminder to me that we can always up our game in customer service. Someone else may have better technology or scale than we do, but it’s within our power to serve our customers with excellence. Let’s do it!

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