"Nobody wakes up and decides to give bad service today. But in some cases, giving poor service can be more beneficial to a manager or associate than taking some other action that would satisfy the customer"
Onlooker

In the results-driven rent to own environment, employees can fear being labeled as someone who “takes the customer’s side.” Too many managers make it clear everyday that looking out for the customer means shortchanging the company. If you doubt this, just check your own store’s pickup numbers.

The First Principle of Quality Management
The fear of leaning too far in the customer’s direction comes from not understanding the First Principle of Quality Management:

"All organizations depend on their customers and therefore should strive to understand them, meet their requirements, and exceed their expectations"

In other words, no one can be a Company advocate without first being a Customer advocate. Failure to include the First Principle of Quality Management in your training of associates leaves a development gap that can be hard to close. It’s one that is usually discovered only after having thrown additional advertising dollars out the window to get back the business somebody drove off earlier.

“Hard Side” vs. “Soft Side” Issues
Some bosses expect good service to come naturally, as a by-product of doing more important tasks, ones that can be measured in numbers or dollars. You can call this managing the “Hard Side.” Accomplishing multiple tasks under tight deadlines may sometimes be confused with customer service, but never by the customer on the receiving end of it. Customer service can be called the “Soft Side.”

Unexpected failure on the Hard Side - missed communications, procedural breakdowns, etc. - diverts time and energy from the Soft Side at a time when managers can least afford it. When things are heading south, the last thing anybody needs is a long line of customers yelling for what they didn’t get earlier. But most training and nearly all supervision focuses on “Hard Side” success: clearing past dues, making deliveries, hitting numbers, etc. Manager performance is measured by how fast or how cheaply those things get done, not the resulting degree of customer satisfaction.

If I’m a manager, I know that customers can complain by returning the living room set or the big screen TV, and I can overcome that. But my boss complains by firing people, and I can’t overcome that. So I tend to satisfy my boss and not my customer.

My training hasn’t taught me that they are one and the same, and my manager’s words and actions reinforce that they are not.

Good Operators Have Different Skills
Customer service can improve by increasing the importance attached to giving the customer everything he is paying for. That requires altering the Us vs. Them behaviors that tend to flourish in the highly competitive Rent to Own environment. Such change isn’t easy when our customer base is made up largely of people with a poor payment history. But managers who’ve grown stores with good profit, low pickups and strong repeat business have already adopted the right behavior, sometimes even unconsciously.

The ability of those managers to focus on customer satisfaction while at the same time attending to detail has made them good operators. They possess the skills that allow this kind of multi-track thinking, and they’ve been encouraged to hone them by farsighted bosses who recognize talent and know how to develop it.

Less-effective or less-fortunate managers believe customers keep getting in the way of their becoming a good operator. They come armed with zeal and determination, but with fewer skills. If they happen to work for a boss whose field of vision is narrower and shorter, their aggressive attention to meeting his never-ending demands only puts these managers farther away from their goal. Eventually, frustration sets in and they leave or get fired. This is reflected in the classic reason so many people give for leaving our business: “Burnout.”

Improving all this requires first changing the behavior of everybody above Store Manager. Then, because most people want to emulate the boss, everybody else will quickly follow (or be replaced, and sometimes that is not a bad thing).

Improve by Understanding the Difference Between Leadership and Management.
Leaders - Owners, Chairmen, Presidents, etc. - talk about sharing a vision and sharing values, increasing revenue by expanding the customer base. But managers talk about enforcing policy, carrying out procedures that will reduce costs and increase profit. The first requires unwavering commitment to a broad and extended process. The other requires rigid duplication of effort on a daily basis. (This partly explains why great managers don’t always make good owners.)
 

Leaders and Managers
When managers are not fully trained, or when they lack the skills required to succeed in our business, they try to think like leaders in the belief that it will somehow lend more weight and substance to their words.

But if nobody is being a manager while all this leadership talk is being spread around, the resultant breakdown in sales or collections forces the real Leader to think like a manager - How can we get things fixed, and fast?

And so, after awhile, things get fixed, but the company loses its focus and forgets where it was headed. This basic conflict between doing the right thing and doing things right can be avoided if everybody understands their role, and leadership remembers that its real job is to create change, not manage it.

4 Points to Remember about Goals:

1. Before scheduling a meeting, or changing or adopting any policy, apply the Acid Test: How will this help us meet our long-range goals? If it’s not clear that it will, rethink the need for doing anything.
    

2. Begin every communication to stores with a brief explanation of how this directive will help you reach the company’s long-range goals (see 1. above).
    

3. Identify the procedures that most frequently lead to customer dissatisfaction and assign a few top operators to develop acceptable alternatives. Things that dissatisfy have greater influence on customer thinking than those that satisfy, but we tend to focus on satisfiers because those usually require no change to the status quo.
    

4. Add to your “watch list” the average length of time before a unit is returned. This ratio measures how well you are meeting customer needs and thus offers the greatest opportunity to expand the customer base without spending money. Gaining starts by not losing.