Breaking the Rules!!!!

There is an outstanding interview question that I use every time I have to interview a candidate for a customer service position, and that it is used by many executives in several successful companies.

"Tell ma about a time in a past job that you broke the rules for a customer?"

If you ask it of an applicant, they are really going to have to work through a bit a paradox to be able to respond effectively. By conservative interview standards, they might be tempted to say they "never broken the rules". Certainly many traditional candidates might think, " Who wants to hire someone who's going to tell you up front that they don't follow your company's rules?" They'd be wrong, many top executives in succesful companies will hire them, so will I. So in fact, if an applicant were to tell me that he/she never broke the rules for a customer I probably would not hire him/her. Because I think that every business would want their staff to break the rules regularly in order to get better service to their customers.

When you handle this sort of rule breaking well, it allows you to avoid that horrific service scenario that we've all had to suffer through somewhere as customers. The one where your customer want something that's really fairly simple but which, unfortunately, doesn't fit the "proper procedure". So the employee on the other of the line or behind the counter or taking an order by a table, start reciting the rules and telling you that there's nothing he can do. Raises my blood pressure just thinking about it.

It is important to let you know up front this concept of breaking the rules is not an easy one to get across to new staff members. Well, I take that back. It's easy to get the concept across. What's hard is to get the people to really do it. because no matter how much each of us want to break rules now and again, we also have years of socialization and training in our families, our schools and our previous job that have told us that you don't just do that sort of thing. And as a result, even in business where this has been part of the culture, it's quite common to hear new, well meaning staff member slip and start reading a customer the company's policy rather than thinking things through and coming to a creative way to get the customer what he or she wants.