Business Strategy — The Spirit of Service Stories: Customers are Real People, not a Trouble Ticket Number. #BellSystem #TelephonePioneers

Background: 

I had a wonderfully fulfilling 35-year career at AT&T and Bell Labs. The first 15 years were in the pre-Divestiture Bell System, a regulated monopoly.  The following 20 at AT&T were in an ever more competitive industry.  The Bell System and AT&T still have the allure of being my professional “first love.”

My dad Bob and brother Jeff, also spent their careers with the Bell System, specifically The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland. (“C&P” later became part of Bell Atlantic and then Verizon). My mom, Jane, was a C&P operator in Frederick, Maryland during World War II.  For a short time around World War I, my paternal grandfather, the first Robert Reed Harrison, was a C&P cable splicer, also in Frederick. The phone company was our “family business.” 

At its peak, the Bell System employed a million people. Our job was providing telephone service and keeping it working. We believed we were providing a public service. Telephone service was vitally important to the well-being of our Customers:  calling the fire department, an ambulance, or the police, for example.

A painting of Angus MacDonald hung in many Bell System buildings. It showed him patrolling the telephone lines during a blizzard in New England. Wearing snowshoes, MacDonald knocked the snow off the lines so they would not break under the weight of snow and ice. The painting was titled “The Spirit of Service.” 

Most of us, maybe all of us, aspired to be our own versions of Angus MacDonald. Many of us worked with a person, who, on a particular day, in a particular situation, was just that:  an “Angus MacDonald.”  I don’t remember ever being taught this value, this cultural norm. Instead, it was inspired by listening to the stories that co-workers told about each other.

It’s quite remarkable:  a million otherwise ordinary people all over the country, on occasion, doing extraordinary things to provide telephone service.

In the mid-1950s, my Dad, Bob Harrison, was a central office foreman in Hagerstown, MD.  He was responsible for all the switching and interoffice transmission systems in the 6 central offices in Maryland’s rural Washington County:  Clear Spring, Hagerstown (the county seat with a population of about 40,000), Hancock, Keedysville, Smithsburg, and Williamsport.  The network equipment in these central offices was worth tens of millions of dollars.  The team he led was about 20 technicians.

Every several weeks, each of the foremen in Washington County was the “week-end duty foreman.”  From 5:00 pm Friday until 8:00 am Monday, the duty foreman needed to stay home so they could be reached via the phone to handle any issues that required management attention.  These were the days before cell phones, pagers, text messages, and 24×7 work centers.

Sometimes a Customer wanted to escalate a problem.  Sometimes a technician couldn’t be found to dispatch to work a problem.  The duty foreman handled these kinds of “out of the norm” situations.

The Story: 

One hot and humid summer Sunday evening, Dad was the duty foreman and got a call because a Customer demanded that a technician be dispatched to restore her home phone service immediately, rather than waiting until Monday morning.

For whatever reason, he decided to try to fix her service himself rather than dispatching a technician.  This was counter to the rules.  Management people were not allowed by the contract between the company and the union to do technician work.  Also, he would be away from the phone for a while.  Because Dad was selfless and a servant leader, I like to think he just didn’t want to disrupt a technician’s Sunday evening with their family.

In any case, there had been lightning storms earlier in the evening and Dad had a high probability guess as to cause of the problem and knew, if he were right, the fix was an easy one.

So, Dad and a ten-year-old me hopped in our family car (a nine-passenger Ford Country Squire station wagon, complete with real wood trim) and drove to a residential area in the West End section of Hagerstown.  We parked on the street in front of a modest, brick double house and went to the front door.  Dad knocked on the door and an elderly lady answered.  He introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Bob Harrison from the telephone company and we’re here to fix your phone.” 

We went inside and Dad picked up the phone in the foyer hallway and got no dial tone, which meant the line was dead.  He disappeared into the basement.  Five minutes later, he was back upstairs, and the phone had dial tone and was working again.

(Note for the techies among the Readers:  The problem was caused by a station protector. Lightning had arced across the air gap between two carbon blocks, grounding the line. The fix was rubbing the two carbon blocks against each other to remove the build-up of carbon caused by the arcing.)

The Customer, the elderly lady, was so relieved and thankful she was almost in tears. Possessed of a curious mind and a genuine interest in and love of people, Dad asked her why it was so important to her that the phone be fixed immediately rather than waiting a few hours. She explained that she was a widow and had one daughter, unmarried and an only child, who lived with her.  The daughter was in the hospital recovering from surgery.  If her phone was out of service, she and the hospital had no way of communicating about the well-being of her daughter.  She was worried and alone and concerned about her child, as any parent would be … as you and I would be.

The Lessons: 

Decades later I was thinking about this incident.  It reinforced the hero image I have of Dad.  Further, it taught me lessons.

First, behind every abstraction of a Customer (like a trouble ticket number or an account number or an order number), there is a real human being with very legitimate and very important needs, needs that you or I would have if we were in their position.

Everyone who serves Customers, be they external or internal Customers, should start every interaction with a Customer assuming their needs are legitimate and important.  You are serving someone who really needs your service for their success, if not their well-being.  And, almost always, you are dealing not with a cranky person with an inconvenient and unreasonable demand but, instead, someone who has the same needs you or I would have if we were in their position.

An individual person who solves a Customer problem … large or small … is precious.  Brands and Customer loyalty are built on thousands of small acts of attentiveness to Customer problems by thousands of individual people. 

In my experience, together with a competitively superior cost structure, excellent Customer service virtually guarantees best-in-class revenue growth, market share, and profitability.