So here is a recent example of customer service that was not only inadequate but could have been downright dangerous.

A couple of weeks ago I developed pretty severe back pain. I went to the Doctor, who gave me medicine. That night and the next I did not feel that much better. Still in great pain, I called the doctor’s office and asked to speak to him but he was not available.

The receptionist asked “What’s the problem?” I answered, “I saw Dr. so-and-so yesterday and he gave me this pain medication and I need something stronger”.

Her response, without giving another thought to what might be going on in my life and who I was was, was to simply state “oh, there’s nothing stronger”. She added the kind of silence at the end of the statement that clearly indicated, that in her mind, the conversation was over. It was time for me to get off the phone and leave her alone.

Of course I insisted that I talk to the Doctor, which I did a little bit later and we went over some possibilities:

• “…well you could double the dose..” (I did not think I could do that on my own as these were – as the receptionist mentioned – strong medications)
• “… or we can give you a different medicine”

I said “what does that medicine do and why would you consider it, doctor?”
[and here's the kicker] he said, “because it’s stronger”

So a few quick observations:

• First, It struck me when I initially spoke with the receptionist, that it was unlikely the doctor was going to prescribe a medication that - in the entire world of pharmecuticals – was the strongest dosage/medicine known to man. Was that likely? Was that even possible?  For a sore back? As it turned out the doctor doubled my dose and gave me an additional medication, a muscle relaxer, which actually took care of the pain within a day or two.

• Second thought, which really started getting me angry in retrospect, and one of the reasons I am blogging about it now was… What if I had been a senior citizen? Much like my mother would be – a typical stoic from a generation that did not question the doctor or the doctor’s office. She would have quietly hung up, gotten off the phone (ushered off the phone as the receptionist wished her to be) and would have simply suffered in silence with pain that was not resolved by the given medication.

So the moral here is…

Do you know the kind of information – the quality of information and the tenor of the information – being communicated, by ALL your client-facing staff?

This may seem like an obvious “doctor’s story” or healthcare parable, but it is not just a doctor’s story. It’s an e-commerce story, it’s a retail story, it’s a B2B contracts discussions story… It is all of those stories and it is an area that is all too often unobserved, undeveloped and unmeasured in any meaningful way in companies throughout the world.

This is happening all the time, every day.

Is it happening in your company?