CHAPTER 21
Do You Trust Your Service Team?
Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, in their book Trust Agents, discuss in great detail what a trust agent is and the impact that trust agents have on the web. The book is concentrated on the external aspects of social media, but I would make the case that trust can come through in every interaction that your brand has with Customers. Your service personnel must be considered to be trust agents by the Customers they interact with. We tend to trust people we perceive to be like us.
In the service world, we have been afraid of showing emotion, yet the best calls demonstrate these emotions. How often are your employees willing to say, “I am sorry”? Unfortunately, in many companies, this is virtually never. We have become a very litigious society. This has impact on everything we do, and on the way that businesses operate. This of course adds to the lack of humanizing experiences that occur. One of the first unofficial rules that we were taught was the inability to say, “I am sorry.” I doubt that you will find an official memo anywhere that says not to do this. In fact, during my career I have looked for memos like this and have never found one. But the message is delivered clearly to our employees. Do you have e-mails that travel around the company with a line at the bottom referencing attorney-client privilege? This happens procedurally at larger firms, and I am sure at some smaller companies as well. When legal concerns arise we instruct our ...
