Free Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization by Leonardo Inghilleri, Micah Solomon, Horst Schulze

artificial, fill-in-the-blank manner.
    Have you ever called a help desk and had the person answer, ‘‘Good morning, thank you for calling XYZ, how may I help you?’’ and as 54
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    soon as you give your name it’s inserted into everything, without emotion, without passion, clearly running through a script that appears on the screen? You feel like you could shout out that your house is on fire, and you’d get the exact same vocal response from this mechanized, allegedly personalized service. There’s no point gathering customer information if you’re going to use it in a canned, robotic fashion.
    Principle 7: Using Technology to Ask for Information? It’s a Fine Line
    between Clever and Creepy. Beware the protective bubble. Everyone has what we call a ‘‘protective bubble’’ around himself, to a greater or lesser extent. Teaching your staff to recognize this and probe only gently, re-treating as cued, is one of the keys to attentive service that we will discuss in detail in Chapter 7. But in electronic interactions you lose the human failsafe of direct verbal and nonverbal feedback. And as customers well know, electronic databases have the power to track everything in a way humans never would.
    People respond skeptically when asked to help populate Internet databases. It’s not like when you request information face-to-face: Personally ask somebody where he was born, and there is a high chance he’ll answer openly. At worst you’ll get a ‘‘Why do you want to know?’’
    and thus a chance to retract the question or explain the reason for it.
    But if you require potential customers to divulge information on your company website, you’ll never know whether the requirement drove them away. You won’t realize that they thought your electronic persona was rude or that they didn’t trust the website version of you. Inexplica-bly, you simply won’t get signups.
    The simplest solution is to remove all potentially intrusive questions from your Internet forms. An alternative is to make those questions optional, and fully explain your reasons for asking. Even customer-centered companies sometimes violate this rule; they may then experience a loss of market share or a drop in customer quality that they are never able to trace back to its origin.
    In the physical realm, but with the ‘‘help’’ of technology, one Keeping Track to Bring Them Back
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    family-oriented chain of mall stores crossed this line in their eagerness to use automation, and they may not even have realized it. This company overall has a lot going for it: It serves parents and young children alike, offering a warm and welcoming experience, with great potential to bond with customers. That is, until the last moment—when they encounter an intrusive electronic procedure near the final checkout counter. The checkout kiosk was placarded thus, in huge kiddie-style lettering, the most recent time we visited the store:
    Input your
    • Name
    • Address
    • Email address
    • Gender
    and
    • Date of birth
    in our Kiddie Carousel system and sign up to receive special offers.
    On every screen was cheery animation coaxing things along, complete with letters made out of colorful stars and buttons to simulate a child’s handwriting:
    When is your birthday, [name of child from previous screen]?
    • Month?
    • Day?
    • Year?
    Press the pink key after each entry!
    ( Note : Security experts call date of birth, name, and address the
    ‘‘holy trinity,’’ which, in combination with the often-breached social security number, lead most commonly to identity theft and other privacy problems. All items in this holy trinity are asked for in the se-

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    quence of questions above—and they’re being asked of customers who haven’t graduated elementary school.)
    The temptation to enter an entire birth date is driven home by photos of a family birthday celebration. A small