Travel Thing 2: Copenhagen Snorty-Cabbie and his Unpleasant Underpants.

This is "Thing 2" in a series of three travel Things related to my trip, last year, to Copenhagen. Thing 2 is the second icky thing. Thing 3 will be the lovely thing related to the Customer Sense conference and the people who put it on. So enjoy the vitriol of Thing 2, and stay tuned for the lilting positivity of Thing 3.

When last we spoke (see Travel Thing 1), I was at my Copenhagen hotel ready to sleep off the horror of getting Danish currency. I woke up in plenty of time to get ready and get to the conference by 8ish - I was the first speaker and was going on at 9. And then, because it was raining, I had to wait for a cab for around 40 minutes. Which completely freaked me out - so much so that I actually used my US cell phone to place a call to the conference coordinator Helle, who was totally gracious and calming. I'm loathe to actually use my cell phone when out of the country, unless it's for something really important, like chatting to a friend to get the calming 'voice from home' injected into my travel chaos.

So anyways, I finally get into a cab. We're smack dab in the middle of, not only a downpour, but Copenhagen rush hour (who knew?). I tell the cabbie where I'm going and he starts to snort unhappily. I ignore him.

After a little while he says "your trip is bad." Given the language gap, I assume he's saying "It's too bad it's raining - it must be ruining your trip." So I answer "oh, no, the rain is fine. The trip is nice actually." And he says "No! Your trip, it's bad. I take you 7 minutes over bridge and it take me 40 minutes to come back over bridge. Bad trip." And more snorting.

My first inclination is to guilt, which I'm working on. And I was successful this time…I stopped myself from saying "Oh I'm sorry…I'll give you a tip don't worry." Instead I shrugged and looked out of the window in a manner I was sure conveyed "what a ridiculous thing to say to a paying passenger. Isn't your job to take me to the place I need to go? And if you don't want to go to a particular place, wouldn't it have made much more sense to ask me where I was going before I got in your cab?" As I got angrier, I shifted my gaze and facial expression to continue my silent tirade: "I am a professional traveling woman who needs to give an important, amusing and informative presentation. I'm ignoring you on purpose now."

Of course, when we finally got there, I paid and gave him a tip. (I used to be a waitress and will, therefore, be a compulsive overtipper until the day I die). But I was still rumpled and annoyed and, clearly, thought about it some more.

If you are going to offer a service, especially a paid service, don't grump at the person who willingly takes you up on that offer and decides to pay for your service. If there is something you don't want to do, tell them up front. Most reasonable people don't really want to pay someone to do something they really don't want to do (um. Actually, I think I may have to take that back. But I think you still get the point.) If you don't want to do it, fine. I'll go find someone else. But snorting and harrumphing at a passenger because there is a traffic jam on a Copenhagen bridge at rush hour in a rainstorm is counterproductive on so many levels it's hard to count them. The passenger gets annoyed, or upset, or guilty. The driver gets to vent his frustration, but it changes nothing about his situation - and the amount of time he'll be stuck in traffic. It does, however, probably reduce his tip.

If you are grumping at some of your customers, or have a group of customers or customer behaviors that you think of as 'annoying' or 'expensive,' it's probably your problem. They don't want to be annoying (in most cases). They want what they paid for. If you don't offer it, or offer it halfheartedly, you shouldn't say you do. And if you do continue saying you do offer something that you don't really support, stop snorting at your customers. You're the one being annoying.

I read an interesting book called Angel Customers and Demon Customers. The basic point of the book is that some customers cost your business a lot of money…often through increased customer contacts, fewer lifetime sales, less satisfaction with your products. And many companies end up throwing a lot of money at the problem, trying to reduce the contacts or up the lifetime sales. But Angel Customers and Demon Customers suggests that you actually measure which customers are costing you a lot…and which are bringing in a lot of money…and then pretty much abandon the 'Devil Customers.' It's about as Machiavellian as retail gets, I suppose. But at the risk of sounding like some online version of Ayn Rand, I think they are on to something.

I'd switch the language around a bit though. I'd say: If you identify a particularly expensive or "demonic" set of customers, look more closely. For some reason these people think you are offering something you actually don't offer (a particular level of customer service, or a type of product, or high-touch help with the shopping experience, or whatever). And yes, you should focus most of your attention on keeping the great customers as happy as possible. But why not figure out how to fix the perception problem? Why not offer a clearer explanation of what you do and don't do? If prices are low because you don't staff a lot of customer service reps, what's wrong with telling people this? If your products are actually not that great for certain applications, why not say it?

Instead of abandoning demonic customers, spend some time figuring out what makes them into demons. Someone has to throw water on the little fuzzy Gremlins to make them into nasty things with big fangs (and now I'm totally dating myself by giving cultural references that make sense only to people who were in high school in the early 80s, but hey, we have no secrets). I bet 80% of the Gremlins are annoyed because you threw water on them…whether you realized it or not.