China trying service with a smile
By Jennifer Bjorhus
Knight Ridder News Service
Shanghai officials have five years to erase the rudeness and shoulder-shrugging attitudes of their city's work force before the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
As Shanghai prepares for a historic event bigger than the 2008 Beijing Olympics, an estimated 1.4 million workers citywide will discover how to go the extra mile — American-style — for the 70 million visitors expected for the six-month fair.
They'll study active listening, and good telephone techniques.
They'll learn how to skillfully handle irate customers.
And, to the delight of 57-year-old Bloomington, Minn., businessman John Tschohl, they will be doing all this using his latest book and 12-part DVD series, called "Service First."
Tschohl's company, Service Quality Institute, posts annual sales of just $1 million and sounds like, well, a school for oil changers. But the seven-person firm he founded in 1972 now has licensees, distributors and consultants in some 40 countries, he said.
And in June, it penned three deals for its customer-service training package with the Shanghai World Expo Coordination Bureau and the Shanghai Foreign Service Co. Ltd., a government-owned staffing firm.
"They know you can have this beautiful infrastructure, but if you don't have great service you've got a problem," Tschohl says with the effervescence of a lifelong salesman.
The officials bought the Chinese rights to Tschohl's latest book, "Loyal For Life," and signed a licensing agreement to sell Tschohl's training program in China. They also signed an exclusive agreement to use his materials in the Shanghai Foreign Service's new international training center to train tens of thousands of Expo staff as well as employees of hotels, restaurants, retailers and attractions in the city.
The contracts should be worth several million dollars in royalties over the next five years, Tschohl said. That's not huge, he acknowledges, but it's almost all profit since his cost of goods is nearly zero.
The Chinese didn't want him to film a new set of videos, he said. They wanted the original set, filmed with American actors acting out vignettes inside U.S. companies such as FedEx Corp., Kroger Inc. and Rainbow Foods. The DVDs are voiced-over in Mandarin.
DVD No. 3, "Handling Complaints and the Irate Customer," shows an employee politely handling a customer returning a gallon of sour milk and another diffusing an angry veteran who got the run-around from his medical-benefits provider.
Focus on the problem, Tschohl advises. His approach for handling difficult problems includes these steps: Ask polite questions and listen, take responsibility for resolving the situation, apologize for the inconvenience, offer solutions, and thank the customer for bringing the problem to your attention. Remember to give yourself a pep talk, he urges, so you don't take hostility personally.
Some in the customer-service industry pooh-pooh Tschohl's prepackaged training product for having a somewhat canned approach. But competitors acknowledge his new China deals tap a potentially big business.
"It's a huge market opportunity because the Western model of customer service is not practiced in the majority of China," said Kristin Anderson Bottemiller, a Minneapolis customer service consultant and co-author of the "Knock Your Socks Off Service" series of books. "It's a very hot area."
Roy Magee, head of Achieve Global Inc.'s Shanghai office, agrees. "Everybody in China moans and groans about customer service. Foreigners are intensely frustrated about it," said Magee, whose Florida-based company provides customer service, leadership and sales performance training.
Despite this, Anderson Bottemiller said Tschohl's deals speak more to the significance of the upcoming World Expo "than some awakening in China to the need for customer-service skills."
Service is actually fairly good in China, Tschohl reports. And in China's best hotels, it's significantly better than in the United States.
That said, challenges abound. Tschohl said he has noticed many Chinese companies add more workers — "They throw people at things," he said — but don't expect much in the way of performance.
Tschohl said he got his foot in the door in China in 2002 when he conducted a training seminar for Hangzhou Telecom Industry Group. That led to doing a seminar in Shanghai, which the head of Shanghai Foreign Service happened to attend, for Bank of Communications Ltd., China's fifth-biggest lender.
The toughest service problem for his Chinese clients, Tschohl says, is a universal one — teaching workers to feel empowered to solve problems and to act swiftly.
"People love rules, policies and procedures, so they don't have to think."
