10 Rules for Stifling Customer Service

I went on a management course this week, and we were taught Kanter's '10 Rules for Stifling Change'. (See: Kanter, R.M. (1985) The Change Masters.) Naturally, this inspired me to come up with a similar list for customer service, specifically customer service in academic libraries. And, in keeping with the original list, it's more than a little facetious.

1. Always promise the Earth. It shows customers you really care. I mean, we can always find a missing book, have your inter-library loan ready within a week, digitise every single article request and order every single book you need for your research.

2. Remember that if you've never dealt with a specific problem before, you're of no help whatsoever. There's no point looking on the Intranet, or asking a colleague what to do. It'll never come up again.

3. Complaints and challenging customers are utterly, utterly annoying. Don't worry. The more you ignore them, the sooner they'll go away.

4. Nobody ever makes mistakes. Errors are clearly the customer's fault. Technology never fails, there's never a problem with communicating new information to staff, and everyone gives out the correct information, one hundred percent of the time.

5. Aggressive customers deserve to have their views belittled and ignored. Because they're angry, we should be far less accommodating to their wants and needs.

6. Decisions impacting upon your customers should always be made by senior management. Why bother consulting front-line staff and users? Who else to better articulate the needs of a cohort than a group of trained professionals who haven't been service users for many years?

7. You don't ever want to give customers the impression you enjoy helping them and like your job, so stay as stoic, stiff, and inflexible as you possibly can.

8. People who are flexible and use their own initiative and judgement are never treated with respect. Be sure to control everything with an iron fist. You've been given the power, so you must use it at every opportunity.

9. There's no point in changing a procedure. If no-one has complained about it before, it clearly can't be improved.

10. As staff, we will always know what's best for our customers, even though our customers are the ones who will use our facilities and resources. Never forget that your customers should be told this frequently, lest they forget our value.