There’s an ice cream parlor 40 minutes from home – a delicious enough destination that the lengthy drive is no deterrent. The ice cream’s made on premises, the awnings and décor both retro and creative. And the people who work there are nice.
Or nice-ish.
What they lack is a culture of saying “yes.” Without a culture of yes your customers will, well, start to say no.
I discovered that this culture was missing not through my mad consulting skills, but the way any other customer would: by asking for something slightly offscript. In the course of paying for ice cream I had ordered for our family and guests (a $23.40 bill), I mentioned that my kid wanted to use a gift token their violin teacher had given her
The cashier’s answer: “that token is only for one scoop, and every sundae you ordered was two scoops, so there’s no way to apply it. Sorry.”
So much better if he had ended with a “yes”: “Absolutely, we can credit the value of a scoop upgrade.” That way, an 80 minute round trip, and 6 minutes inhaling our ice cream, doesn’t become colored by a single, unnecessary negative.
But does “yes” scale to the online, multi-transaction world?
The importance of building a corporate culture of “yes” is a straightforward and basic concept when we’re discussing the world of nostalgia-themed ice cream stores and the like. I need to concede, however, that when we get into the automated online ecommerce world, it gets a bit less straightforward. In some businesses – eBay and its subsidiary PayPal come to mind – not everybody is a customer; some c sad to say, are posing as customers but are actually plain old (or should I say, hypermodern) thieves, out to rip those businesses off. And a fortress mentality, in particular parts of the operation, has to rule—not just for the benefit of the company itself but for the benefit of other customers as well.
And yet, and yet… when a true, human customer –the kind who writes actual sentences or speaks them into the telephone – contacts a company, even one of these continually under assault companies, that contact needs to be handled by a representative from a culture of saying yes.
Banking as a model
This balance is hard to maintain in the extreme edges of online commerce, so if we’re hesitant to entirely embrace the ice cream parlor analogy here, what does work as a model? Well, think about a great customer-centered bank or credit union. It has security procedures. Extremely good, careful procedures. But it doesn’t repeatedly ask for ID from the customers who come in every day. It waives the overdraft fees for good customers. It has a culture of saying yes to customers. And no to the bad guys.
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