The 3-step recipe for great customer service we learned from a deli

Telling your employees to give great customer service is easy. Teaching them to give great customer service is… less easy. 😅

Before founding KnowledgeOwl, I led the Customer Support team at SurveyGizmo. Like many companies, SurveyGizmo prided itself on giving great customer service. It was our north star – the guiding light in everything we did.

However, it used to be hard to communicate what "great customer service" actually meant and how to accomplish it.

In this article I'll share the three customer service-related mistakes I used to make and the 3-step recipe for great customer service that helped me overcome these mistakes.

Mistake #1: Just hire people who "get it"

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t hire people for customer service skills. In fact, it’s probably the most important talent to look for in prospective employees if you want to be an organization known for great customer service.

Over the years, I've gotten pretty good at asking the right questions to help discern who is service-minded. We ask questions in our application survey from the customer's point of view; we also ask some CS-related questions during interview that all candidates must pass.

However, sometimes a potential hire might excel across all stages of the application process, but they might still make decisions in day-to-day customer service situations that aren’t up to our standards. But had we defined our standards and communicated them? Nope. We just told people to give great service and let them fill in the blanks.

Hiring people who demonstrated great customer service skills during the application process helped us give great service most of the time, but not all of the time.

So does this mean we hired the wrong candidates? It would be convenient to say so, but that’s a pretty unfair statement. We set an expectation for great service without ever clearly defining it or communicating it. That was our fault.

The 90-5-5 Rule

Enter the 90-5-5 rule. It makes total sense and works with most topics. Let’s say we are talking about customer service. Out of 100 people…

• 5 people will be able to give great customer service no matter the situation (it’s just who they are).
• 5 people will never be able to give great customer service (it’s just not who they are).
• 90 people have the ability to give great customer service – they just need to be taught!

Now you can try to only hire the 5%, but if we are being honest, that is really difficult (even with the world's best hiring practices)!

Thankfully, you don't have to find the elusive 5% – all you have to do is effectively teach the 90% how to give great customer service.

But how the heck do you teach great customer service? What if we could come up with a phrase or mantra that would empower everyone to give consistently great service?

Mistake #2: "Do the right thing"

In my early days as a customer service manager, I naively thought that “Do the right thing” would be the mantra that resulted in consistent, outstanding service. That was until I realized that everyone has a different idea of what the “right" thing is.

For example, say a customer wanted to access information from their trial account that was limited to paid accounts. Many customers would upgrade to a paid account to get access (which is awesome and exactly what we want to happen) but occasionally someone will ask to extend the trial or access their trial data without paying.

To me, the "right" answer is to extend their trial and give them access to the information they want. But that really rubs some customer service agents the wrong way because it’s not fair to the other people who upgraded. To some, doing the "right" thing is doing what is fair and following the rules. To me, doing the "right" thing is making the customer happy. Well, maybe that should be our mantra…

Mistake #3: "Make the customer happy"

So maybe "do the right thing" could vary among people, but surely "make the customer happy" would lead us all to the same decisions? Wrong again.

Customers aren’t always that great at saying what they actually need or want. Even highly specific questions can be misleading unless you understand the context.

"Make the customer happy" has caused many issues – not only for our customers, but also for our different teams in the company. Great customer service does not mean to just say "yes" and give into every single customer request – it is more about truly understanding customers' needs and desires and finding a solution from there.

Solution: Zingerman’s 3 Steps to Giving Great Service

So you adopted a deli’s model for great customer service? Yes, we did! Bill Flagg introduced us to Zingerman’s in early 2011. He let me borrow a DVD called, "Zingerman’s 3 Steps to Giving Great Service". Thirteen years later, these lessons are as relevant as ever. Nowadays, you might prefer to order the book, which I highly recommend.

I was still at SurveyGizmo in 2011, and we watched the DVD as a team. At first, it didn't feel super clear how to apply these lessons from a deli to a software company. However, over a few months, we realized that their 3-step recipe for great service really did work for us. In fact, it’s almost perfect for any customer service situation:

1. Find out what the customer wants.
2. Get it for them accurately, politely, and enthusiastically.
3. Go the extra mile.

These 3 simple steps summarize exactly what we had always wanted our CS team to do. When we hired people who were service-oriented, when we told people to “do the right thing”, and when we asked them to “make customers happy”, we were really wanting people to follow these 3 fundamental steps.

These 3 steps make it easy for the 90% to give great service almost every single time!

Bonus: How to effectively manage complaints

Not only did Zingerman’s help us define a process for giving great service, they also helped us teach our employees how to effectively manage customer complaints.

When we purchased the "Zingerman’s 3 Steps to Giving Great Service" DVD for ourselves, it came with a separate DVD titled, "5 Steps to Effectively Handling a Complaint". (You can find the summary in a blog post from ZingTrain.)

The following 5-step recipe for handling complaints revolutionized the way we deal with upset or difficult customers:

1. Acknowledge
2. Apologize
3. Make it right
4. Thank them
5. Document it

Almost anyone who is any good at customer service (or at least going through the motions) will likely do the first two steps. And people who are great at it will do those steps over and over again until the customer is ready to move on. The “Making it right” step is reserved for companies that empower their employees to resolve situations for customers in a more meaningful way.

But the “aha” moment for me was thanking the customer. Having it as one of the steps taught me that each and every customer complaint and piece of feedback is a gift. Customers don’t have to complain or give feedback – it’s usually very difficult to do! This step is a constant reminder that we should be grateful for complaints and the opportunity to make things better. After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know about!

Thanking the customer for complaining adds humility and appreciation to some of the most difficult customer conversations. It makes dealing with difficult customers and situations much easier. It’s amazing to experience a customer's reaction when you sincerely thank them for complaining!

Stealing Customer Service Tricks from Zingerman’s

Back when I was a middle school teacher, the best piece of advice I received was that "the best teachers are the best thieves". Basically, this means that great teachers learn from the successes and mistakes of others and incorporate those lessons into their classroom.

More people should know about the awesomeness that is Zingerman’s. They have truly helped us reach a new level of customer service and grow our business in an ethical and sustainable manner.

They have a lot of great ideas to steal (they actually encourage people to do so!) and I highly recommend checking out ZingTrain’s books, pamphlets and online training courses.

And if you are ever in Ann Arbor, Michigan, you should definitely stop by Zingerman’s Deli for one of the best sandwiches in America!