[First published on StartupCentral]
Running a business is a battle, as much as it is poetry. It takes a lifetime of determination, weeks of grit and yet promises those moments of sheer joy and a sense of fulfillment. The challenges in a business are many and effective customer service is one of them. It cannot just be you fighting all the battles and writing all the poems. There is a need for you to build a community of like-minded people within your organization, focused on the common goal of startup nirvana — great success in what you’re doing.
Having warriors and monks
Customer service is a team game. From the front ranks to the folks who handle the back-end, the team should be equally motivated and aware of what goes into your product or service in order to delight your customer. If they are upset, can a smile on the phone help? If their requirement is urgent, can going out of the way help? If they are very happy, can sending over a few muffins help? And the best ways to be diplomatic while saying ‘no’? You understand how the entire team should be on one page while communicating with your customer.
Warriors win you battles
We do need team members with hearts of lion and claws of steel. We need them to be brave, confident go-getters who won’t take an easy ‘no’ for an answer. These warriors are motivated as much by the potential of their personal success as their growth with your company. When a customer complains, warriors are at the forefront mollifying the troubled soul, taking prompt action against those at fault and suggesting changes to the system that brought about the complaint. Warriors are charming, decisive and aggressive. You can trust them to handle those tough situations.
Monks win you hearts
Soft spoken, conscious and empathetic-monks delve into the human essence of every customer interaction. There are times when the customer is unreasonable and a warrior might be tempted to take an extreme step. Or perhaps a team member has committed sacrilege in customer service and a warrior might be tempted to be upfront, not caring that the customer is around.
Monks come in with cool heads and grasp the situation from a holistic perspective. They are polite, humble and diplomatic. Their few, well chosen words almost always yields desirable results. Monks make poetry of situations, they blog about the experiences, they photograph smiles and are gifted with content marketing skills.
Warriors might break open the gates and solve most of your problems. Monks, however, come in when the problems are sensitive, complicated, escalated and ‘convert’ for the greater good.
Two sides of the same coin
Ideally, it is best for your warriors and monks to be the same people. If they can consciously decide when to sheath the blade and handle the present, you have winners on board. Customer service is all about interacting with people who have the same emotions, the same opinions and the same reactions as you. However, the trick is to keep that in mind when you run the other side of the counter.
The combination of a bloodthirsty army and enlightened monks will take you a long way in building a winning customer service culture. Identifying the problem at hand and dealing with it using a relevant solution makes sense.
Train your tribe
Your team needs to be convinced about some traits that are often forgotten when in the field. From basic courtesy, punctuality and sincerity, to taking responsibility when the situation threatens to get out of hand. Identify dominant traits in your team members and groom them right. Send them out in the open, test them and discuss what was to be learn’t over coffee.
Be good to them, they look up to you. Share what made you startup, share what keeps you going. When you share your motivations behind providing delightful service, it inspires them. They relate to the stories you tell them and the stories get shared.
Have monks in your ranks along with warriors. That will ensure great customer service. As the wise Yoda once said, “Wars not make one great.”
Do you agree? 🙂 Would love to read your customer service experiences!
Saraswathi Pulluru
Good read. Just one point – Usually, by nature a person is either a warrior or monk. It is very rare to see both the qualities in one single person. However, if the team lead is that person with both warriors and monks in his kitty, that will be one startup whose customers would be very happy!
Sushrut Munje
True. And while starting up, either the entrepreneur himself has to be both or should find someone to complement his traits. Thanks!
Darshan Bhambiru
You Clean it with a Mop and Battle with a Pen
Now You can have MOP shaped Pens which can be used to Mark a place CLEANED and leave it there with your InSignia and also use it to Fight later on when not cleaning as well 😛
You Need Just one (Monk or Warrior) the Other can be always Converted from spare ;)Since you wont be using Both together any time.
Toss the Coin you are bound to get a landing on Heads (Monk) or Tails (Warriors) [Unless of course it is not the coin from SHOLAY] Cheers!!
asha chaudhry
i really liked this post.
i’ll let the others comment 🙂
Sushrut Munje
I’m at a loss for words. Thanks Darshan 🙂
Sushrut Munje
and Asha 🙂 Thank you.
Karan Pandhi
Sushrut,
It makes me remind of the movie “Bulletproof Monk”. a warrior and a monk, what a combination
super like
But it happens quite a times the warrior cant be controlled as much as the monk
Yet this post is great for employee spirit and team building . Thanks for the points buddy 🙂
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
Speaking of Monks… Hows this for a story to learn from?
Losing is winning.
In the upper Himalayas, an ancient Tibetan monastery follows a secret Zen tradition. Newly ordained monks perform their daily rituals of chanting, meditation, cooking and cleaning and in the evening paint colorful patterns on the floor (Rangoli in India) using dry powder paint. Initially they draw basic patterns and then graduate to complex designs.
In the second year of their stay, they are inducted into a very sacred ritual. The Master priest gives each monk an extremely intricate and complicated design to replicate as their Rangoli. This pattern is so complex that it takes 5 years of part time work in the evening to complete. The monks are made to vow to keep their pattern secret and not show their work in progress to anyone. Their reward for this mammoth effort is to have their complete painting examined by the head Sensei (Priest) of the monastery. If the divine Sensei is pleased, he can bless the monk.
After 5 long years of working on one painting, the examination day arrives and the monks tremble with trepidation as they take their master and Sensei to their room for the final review. The Sensei wears heavy robes, with the long overflowing sleeves that reach the ground.
Just as the painting is being shown, the Sensei calls out to the monk, looks him in the eye, and in one strong, swift motion, wipes clean the painting with his robe’s sleeves without even looking at it. The act is sudden, swift and brutal – executed with a benevolent smile.
It is said that the act of seeing 5 years of your hard labor being wiped out in a stroke creates a moment of ‘blankness’ in the minds of the well-trained monks, and that blankness produces nirvana (enlightenment). If not immediately ‘enlightened’, the monks begin weeping with joy at the realizationthat nothing lasts forever and everything must go.
Imagine making this to get it wiped out
(Image Courtesy – AparajitP)
Entrepreneurs I know shiver from the word ‘failure’. What they must realize is that one venture or a business is just like a Rangoli – the act of it disappearing ‘may’ create the enlightenment of success in you.
Celebrate failure!
Do you really have a problem?
In 2008, my partner Mahesh and I were convinced that players were discovering flash games on the web in a chaotic way. Consumers had to go to portals and then play the games the portals featured there. If I wanted to say play only ping-pong games, I could not discover all ping-pong games in one place. Google would give me some links, but also of the videos and images of the real ping pong game, etc.
We felt that there had to be a single destination to search and discover flash games, and if executed well, we could be the first movers in that space.
When we presented the concept of ‘gamecurry.com’ to our board, the investors were puzzled. Why were we getting into the search business? Did this make sense? Wouldn’t this distract us from our day to day business. How would we make revenue? I still remember Sumant Mandal of Clearstone Venture Partners telling me ‘Alok, the ads revenue arbitrage in just letting consumers discover content via search is dead. Why would you want to pursue this’?
Despite all these doubts, Mahesh and I went gung-ho creating gamecurry.com. We spent a good amount of time, energy and resources putting the site together and allocating armies of teams to search, index and tag global games.
The site launched in mid 2008 and we promoted the service extensively using our own network, etc.
The concept was a massive failure. Nobody seemed to return after using the site once and there was no viral traffic being built up. The worst part was that a service intended to help consumers was being spurned so badly. Much later we figured out that kids don’t search for games on search sites – they like to ‘stumble upon’ them.
We failed at this project but learnt an important lesson all entrepreneurs must imbibe – Even before you create an amazing solution, ask your consumers if they even want it? Your consumers will not use something made ‘easy’ if they never had a problem in the first place!
Why do everything the old fashioned way?
In mid 2007 I had this brainwave that if so many young people liked to play ‘dumb-charades’ (charades in the USA), why shouldn’t they play it online? It would take away the pain of assembling people in a room and the web idea of a traditional game could infinitely expand the universe of players to millions.
I convinced the contests2win team (a company I am on the board of) to create youcharades.com. The idea was to host a set of 200+ quality ‘charades’ that consumers all over the world would log in to watch, and then predict which movie was being enacted. Players could also shoot their charades and send them in!
Contests2win hired a foreign crew of actors and models in Mumbai and shot very slick videos. They invested in a video player backend that integrated with flash technology. There was extensive work done on the site and they even created a Myspace application for the same.
On launch day, I dreamt of instant nirvana (like the monks). By mid week, there was little pick up. By the end of the month the site and the idea was in the weeds.
What I had failed to identify was that it was not the game of dumb charades that youngsters liked so much – it was more the act of getting together with friends and family and really prancing around and making fun of each other in the process of playing out a movie title.
While youcharades.com was erased in an instant, I learnt 2 very crucial lessons:
Who needs human intervention – get it automated!
Advergaming (or integrating advertising and online games) has been a business we as a group pioneered globally (circa 1998). While the concept is very interesting and rewarding, there is huge pain involved in meeting clients, getting briefs, meeting repeatedly to present work in progress, making changes to the game and convincing the client that the game is indeed ‘perfect’. It frustrates the most hardened of servicing people and creates massive friction between internal teams.
After a success lasting 10 years and 1000 advergames, I was convinced that an ‘automated’ solution was the answer. I hammered the contests2win management to create a one stop ‘do it your self’ advergaming destination called gamewok.com. The site allows potential clients to ‘order’ their advergames and toss up (like a wok) options of game type, look and feel, budget, etc, that clients can choose and mix and match.
A year later, we still haven’t received a single order via gamewok.com. The site is a disaster. The verdict is simple – a hands on, meeting of the ‘hearts and minds’ process that results in business being won can never be automated.
Lesson – don’t try and automate what pains you. The pain is what brings the profits.
I dedicate this post to all those entrepreneurs out there who have had hits and misses. The important thing to remember is what a famous man said – ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. Who cares if the first step begins with a sprained ankle?
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Originally posted on August 13, 2010 on rodinhood.com
Sushrut Munje
Thank you, Karan.
I did receive your longer comment in my email which I read. Would like to mention that ‘hawks’ are people who fail to understand customer service. They have not been trained well and are unfit to face the customer. Wrote about Monks and Warriors assuming that there are no hawks in your employment 🙂
Sushrut Munje
It is a wonderful story to learn from. Thank you for sharing.