Old Customer Care Lady Sayings

As a leader in customer care, over the years I have developed a few sayings that I believe have held me in good stead.

Camille’s Top Three Customer Care Sayings

#1: No Special Snowflakes

This means that –as much as possible — we want to avoid having to support custom features, special builds, weird bespoke SLAs, and anything else that is going to be hard to track and resolve. Specialness is frustrating to handle and an impediment to scale. If we are running a tiny neighborhood cupcake shop, fine, I am happy to handcraft cupcakes. If we are trying to build a mega cupcake conglomerate, it needs to come off the conveyor belt the same as the others. I tend to say this to sales people and occasionally to overzealous engineers.

#2: Keep Receipts

In your career and in your day to day work, a lot of information goes flying back and forth and it can be hard to track across public Slack channels, private Slack channels, DMs, emails, Google Docs, Zoom calls and so and so forth. When in doubt (and you should mostly just STAY in doubt), write things down, have other people write them down to you, record things, screenshot things.
You will forget.
People will forget.
People will pretend they forgot.
People will try to reinvent the wheel.
People will try to rewrite history based on their faulty memories or wishful thinking.
Keep receipts to remind them (and yourself!) of the good things, the bad things, the mistakes, and the almost-forgotten strokes of genius.

#3: Reduce information asymmetry

I wrote about this here and it is a brief read, but the tl;dr isI this:

If you know something that the customer should know, tell them right away. It will give them some information to gather OR help them set expectations on their side OR prompt them to fashion a workaround. They might not be happy about what you tell them, but at least they won’t be sitting idle wondering if you forgot about them and their problem.

What about you? What are some of your favorite sayings or rules of thumb?