Why We Love It When Customer Service Professionals Remember Us & What We Like

This summer, my wife and I have traveled quite a bit.  We have had the privilege of some amazing customer service experiences.  One thing, in particular, has stood out.  Some customer service professionals got to know us, remembered our names and our preferences, and anticipated our needs and desires before we articulated them.  Sometimes, they remembered our favorite drink order.  In other cases, they asked us how we enjoyed our previous day's adventure.  We loved it.  Why?  Well, of course, humans love to feel valued.  We enjoy being seen and heard.  These professionals clearly had listened to us, gotten to know us, and had made the effort to make a connection with us.  In turn, we learned their names, and we got to know them.  When our breakfast waiter at the hotel had a day off, we asked him about the day when he returned.  He appreciated the chance to share what he had done.  These professionals were not in a hurry to simply fulfill our order.  They took that extra time to interact with us.  They made a human connection.   

Sometimes, these professionals made mistakes. Honestly, we didn't care much at all. We were very forgiving because we felt valued, and they were clearly trying to help us.  They apologized. We let it go.  Companies cannot prevent all mistakes.  However, they can create a customer experience in which most people will be quite forgiving.  

The lesson for companies is clear: Don't just value efficiency in customer service.  Make sure that you emphasize the value of building human connection.  Encourage your people to listen actively, learn customers' names, and get to know them.  Don't penalize them for taking an extra minute to fulfill an order.  Weigh the long run benefits against that tiny drop in "productivity" that you might experience.  Moreover, companies should consider helping their employees build their active listening and empathy skills.  Some people are naturals at making human connections. Others will need some training.  Invest in building those capabilities; the payoff will be great. 

Interpersonal Coordination on High Performance Teams

What's the key ingredient to high performance when teams function in demanding, high-stress environments? Mary Waller and her co-authors have studied this question in the context of airplane cockpit crews. They published a paper recently titled "More than a feeling: rapport and complex task performance in teams."  They examined three elements of rapport within these teams while they worked in flight simulators:

1. Interpersonal liking: how positively did the individuals engage with one another
2. Emotional positivity: how optimistic and positive was the emotional tone of their conversations
3. Interpersonal coordination:  How well synchronized was their verbal communication and action

Sally Blount summarized their key finding: “Positivity and liking are great. But unless you can translate that positivity and liking into improved collaboration, it doesn’t have a significant impact on team performance.”  After analyzing video recordings of the teams in the simulator, the researchers observed how the coordination among the high-performing teams tended to be more complex, nuanced, and synergistic.  Kellogg Insight summarized the findings:

Overall, the researchers found that, on average, the teams with the highest levels of interpersonal coordination communicated more often, especially with commands, observations, suggestions, and laughter. The interactions between these pilots also were “significantly more complex” than the interactions between pilots with lower interpersonal coordination.

“In the low-interpersonal-coordination groups, you had less communication and also less encouragement and building off of each other,” Blount says. “So, if things aren’t going well, you might be saying, ‘This guy isn’t helping me, so I’m going to hunker down,’ versus ‘Okay, we got this,’ and ‘I see that. What do you see?’”

Not surprisingly, the pilots themselves did not always perceive the link between rapport and performance correctly.  

Interestingly, when liking and positivity were high, the pilots themselves thought they performed better, but that perception did not always translate into better expert evaluations. The tendency to associate more-positive interactions with better performance is common within teams, but it can be misleading and is a well-known contributor to groupthink, Blount says.