How Speech Act Philosophy Impacts on Customer Service Strategy

"Erik: How does speech act philosophy impact customer service strategy? Alan: Speech acts are really about being crystal clear about the promise. That’s really what we’re trying to eliminate, any ambiguity there. Now, that being said we do also want to leave room for negotiation. And so, we basically coach our teams in terms of engaging with customers, listening to customers, and then based upon what they’ve heard and what they know – the expertise that they bring, then they make a promise to the customer. Just a simple example of that would be a customer says, ‘This machine, it’s down, it’s lunch hour, it’s my busiest time. What can you do to get the machine up and running now?’ So the service technician obviously listens and says, ‘Okay, it’s the busiest time of day. I can make a quick fix that will get this machine back up and running, but I can’t guarantee you that it’s going to run for more than two hours.’ Customer says, ‘That’s fine.’ That’s a commitment that our service technician has made to the customer and I assure your that it creates great delight for our customer because we’re being forth right in terms of the limitations of our design, okay? So the customer is now in power to say, ‘Yes, we can get through lunch and he’s going to be back at three o’clock where he’s going to take the machine down for an hour and fix it so we don’t have the same problem tomorrow. And there’s a lot of ways that businesses operate today that don’t empower the line, the people, the service technicians, the backbone of a service organization to deliver that type of a promise. It sounds common sense, but unfortunately common sense isn’t common practice."