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When injured, or in pain, do not go to the hospital for sympathy.

For them, your pain is just another day at the office

Hospitals may be the best place to seek care and treatment, but they offer little in the way of comfort. I’ve seen the advertisements and listened to the insurance companies, but they are all lying! It’s not even health care anymore; it’s more like health maintenance (come in when you are broke). A patient really wants someone to feel his or her pain, to understand what is wrong, why it hurts and make the pain go away. The problem is: Doctors and nurses are around pain all the time! They are focused on a solution, not on your pain. This may seem harsh, but it is the only way for them to work effectively.

When working in intense environments a unique distancing occurs, people block out suffering or heightened emotions so that they can fix the problem. Perhaps it is easier to think of a patient as a “broken arm” rather than a 12 year old boy who broke his arm playing football, the night before the big game. But when something hurts, the last person to make you feel better is a guy with a shot, a flashlight or gloves and some KY gel. (You figure it out)

It is similar to the ride operators at theme parks. Every group goes through and screams at the top of their lungs. A thousand times a day screaming joy riders sail by the operators booth as she straps the next group in. “Thank you and enjoy your ride,” click and off they go.  If anything were to go wrong, would they even know? I can imagine the operator as a group runs by, screaming in fear of the killer bee’s that have swarmed their coach, and the operator on the floor just thinks, “yeah, yeah everyone’s having a great time”.

People, your customers, want you to feel their pain, when something breaks. You may not be equipped to distance yourself, but be aware that as time goes on and the customer base increases, you cannot treat everyone with individual attention. You can however; offer them individualized service.

In spite of all that automation offers, there are still certain dynamics to customer service that defy Morse logic. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how quickly you answer the phone, look up the information or fix the problem. You will still have customers who want you to walk a mile in their shoes. The customer does not care how many people are on hold, how busy you are or if you really care about them. They just want you to hear them out and agree that they have a problem that needed your attention.

When a customer calls in to report a problem, they may just want things fixed as soon as possible.  They might also want you to explain why things have gone wrong, as if this was a personal attack on them, and you singled them out for some reason.

I repeatedly received emails from a customer who had a glitch in his email once and he was convinced we were using a “Government Carnivore” to scan his mail. Of course we weren’t, and had no reason to do something of that nature, but to him this was a moment of pain, and he wanted us to share it with him. We sent several answers, reassuring him that he was safe from the prying eyes of the FBI, and that it was safe to e-mail his family.

This type of concern may seem trivial to a typical customer service professional, but for the customer it is a legitimate and serious matter. If you took a loved one to the hospital because they had a severe nose bleed, you might think this is very serious. The blood is everywhere, and what if it is coming from their brain or…your mind wanders as you quickly fill out the paperwork, only to sit for 5 hours in the emergency room.

Naturally the bleeding will have stopped by then, and they were kind enough to give you some cotton balls for 50 dollars, so you go home assured that no one ever bled to death from a nose bleed. Who knew? To you and the loved one this was serious, to the people who see it everyday, it was almost comical.

Imagine you know just a little about computers, and have only been on the job a few weeks. Your system freezes and you may have just erased a very important file. You call the IS shop and they snicker and say, “geeze, just reboot” and hang up. Of course they understand what is serious and what isn’t, but a failure to appreciate the learning curve for new employees, and the fear factor in modern computing will only degrade the service IT professionals give to their users.

Sometimes you just have to share the pain, let them talk about what they did and reassure them. Just as you would want a doctor to give you the same courteous service. We are after all, in the same business.

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