... or “How to be a fire marshall and not a fire fighter”

I am a scientist. My craft is business and my tool is process. This means that when a crisis erupts (call it an angry customer), I don’t run from it. Nor, do I rush to appease. Nor do I hurdle toward a singular solution. Rather, I immediately begin a holistic examination of the underlying process (or lack thereof) which attributed to the breakage. I then fix (or create anew) the process, and as a byproduct avoid the problem from ever reoccurring.

Duh, right?

Well, this is actually a lot harder that it sounds.

Sure, this practice requires strong critical thinking and clean conflict resolution skills. But, much more difficult: it also requires the suppression of ego. I have to head into every situation assuming that I (or my company) screwed up. I have to open my eyes wide and look for answers wherever they hide, be they with an individual, a stupid process, my business model, or even inside myself.

I have found that unless I start with this guilty-until-proven-innocent approach, I never seem to get to the answer – and my managers are even less successful as they typically start out in damage-control/CYA mode. I tell them: “the goal is to become fire marshals instead of “fire fighters”.

There are a few things I have learned from ten years with this approach:

1. The complaining customer is almost always right.
This sounds like a cliché, but I have found that it usually takes *a lot* for a customer to get mad enough to blow a fit. If you stop focusing on their anger and start focusing on the source of their anger, there is usually a lot to learn. Again, suppression of ego is critical here.

2. Nothing ever happens just once, even if you only heard about it once.
Anything that blows up once, will continue to blow up if you don’t find the problem at its source and develop process to solve it permanently. Close your eyes and imagine every crisis you have had this month reoccurring 10x each over the next year. Now, you understand why global resolution is the only resolution.

3. There are always several problems, so don’t stop looking after one.
Just as a car accident usually involves a couple of simultaneous errors and some bad luck, so do business crises. So, the lesson I have learned is: “keep looking *after* you find that first problem.” You usually will find a few other lurking process issues.

My approach does not mean that I kowtow to every angry customer and engage in random acts of apology/acquiescence. Quite the opposite. I have no problem telling a customer that their complaints are unfounded. But, I never do this until I conduct very intense forensics. And, about 85% of the time, they customer *is* right.

My managers used to try to tell me (after a fiasco), we did nothing wrong. The customer was (fill in the blank here) a) confused b) unlucky c) lazy d) lying. None of these answers every fly with me anymore, so they stopped trying. Now they all know to look at the flawed processes, which always reside at the core of the debacle and ‘git to work fixin’ em!

How do you handle customer crisis in your company?