I was called in to consult a major insurance company that was faced with a conundrum.

The sales team was losing one important customer after another due to complaints about poor handling of conversations by the customer service team.

The customer service team believed it was top notch, having just won a “best service” award from a survey company.

Who was right

I audited calls and interviewed reps and managers and found that the service team was significantly lacking in several vital areas. Perhaps most surprising was the size of the gap between how well you THOUGHT you were doing and how well you REALLY were doing.

I had witnessed this disconnect before in customer service call centers.

For example, it is common for reps to exaggerate the frequency of angry customers and conflicting calls they handle on an average day.

When asked what percentage of calls involve conflict, the answers are usually “50%” and even higher. When the underlying calls are examined, conflicts make up only 5% or less of overall conversational content.

There are many reasons for this important distortion, notably the fact that negative experiences are often more memorable than positive ones. They leave us with a more emotional “charge” that we need to dispel because they seem to linger in our psyche longer than pleasant exchanges.

Also, the “war stories” that the representatives tell each other in the breaks are more likely to contain references to clients from hell than from heaven. Conflict is juicier gossip stuff, and every rep has at least one favorite horror story to tell, allowing everyone to engage in cathartic coffee break chats.

Retelling these tales has the effect of making them seem more numerous and more significant than they actually had been, just as the “escaped fish” always seems to grow with each recital of that story.

Customer service representatives, however, are not the only ones who experience what are called “perception deficits,” gaps between their perceived and self-reported experiences and objectively verifiable actual experiences.

Doctors distort, too, as a recent study on “handwashing” revealed.

Many clinicians fail to clear an acceptable rate between patient encounters, although they believe they do.

A recent New York Times article explains why:

“There also appear to be psychological reasons for non-compliance. The first is what might be called a perception deficit. In an Australian medical study, physicians self-reported their handwashing rate at 73 percent, whereas when these same physicians were observed, his actual rate was a paltry 9 percent. The second psychological reason, according to a Cedars-Sinai physician, is arrogance. “The ego can kick in after you’ve been in the practice for a while,” explains Paul. Silka, an emergency department doctor who is also the hospital’s chief of staff. ”You say,“ Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the rest of the hospital staff. ”Furthermore, most of Cedars-Sinai doctors are free agents working for themselves, not the hospital, and many of them saw the impending Joint Commission review as a nuisance. His incentives, in other words, weren’t quite aligned with those of the hospital. ” (Source: “Freakonomics:” Selling Soap “, New York Times, September 25, 2006.)

Customer service dispensers also develop a considerable ego after being in their roles for a significant period of time, as they reminded me when I tried to cash a check at a Houston bank where I had a savings account.

Sensing that the cashier was being overly fussy about the transaction, I muttered, “This is not my idea of ​​good customer service,” to which she replied, “I’ll let you know that I give GREAT customer service!”

In practice, it becomes a great challenge to confront service personnel with the gap between their perceived performances and the underlying realities about them.

To do this constructively, appropriate service quality thresholds to be met must be objectively defined and communicated to service personnel. Frontline staff need classroom training and individualized guidance and implementation guidance to ensure they have the experience to raise the bar of performance and rise to the occasion by surpassing it, time after time.

Once this is done, these levels must be maintained through monitoring, measurement, management, and reward.

Perception deficits can be common, but where possible, they should be identified and eliminated.

Closing these gaps in the world of medicine means that doctors will save lives by facing the facts and reforming their habits.

By providing better service, we will save customers.

In both cases, it is worth the effort!