Communication and Customer Service

If you don’t listen to your customers on the first contact, you will pay for it on the fifth. The customer will have stopped complaining by then and started deciding whether to leave.

The best illustration I know is a story that has circulated by email for years. It is usually described as real correspondence between a London hotel and a guest, sent to the Sunday Times with no names attached. I can’t verify where it started, and it isn’t mine, so I’ll only summarise it here. You can find the full text on plenty of humour sites.

What happened in the hotel soap letters?

The guest, a Mr. Berman, writes a short note to the maid. He has brought his own bath-sized bar of Dial, so he asks her to stop leaving the little hotel bars and to remove the ones already there. They are in his way.

That is the whole request. One sentence of it is a complaint, one is an instruction.

What follows is four different staff members answering it: a relief maid, his regular maid, the housekeeper and the assistant manager. Each one reads the note, does something reasonable inside their own job, and tells the next person nothing. Soap is moved, returned, replaced, restocked. After five days he has 24 bars in the room. A few letters later he has 54, and his own Dial has gone missing.

Every reply was polite. Every reply was also about the reply before it, not about what he had asked for.

Why did nobody solve a one-line request?

Nobody was careless. The relief maid followed her instructions to leave three bars a day. The housekeeper followed hers. Management said its maids leave three bars each visit, and that was true.

Each of them answered the policy. None of them answered the guest.

That is the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing gets you the words, “too much soap.” Listening gets you the request behind them: stop the soap, and give me back my own bar.

Support teams do this every day, and it is an uncomfortable thing to see in your own queue. A ticket comes in, the agent matches it to a category, and the category has a standard response. The customer gets an answer to the category.

How much does it cost when customers have to repeat themselves?

More than most teams track. A Harvard Business Review analysis of a Corporate Executive Board study, covering more than 75,000 customers, found that effort predicts loyalty better than delight does. In that data, 56% of customers reported having to re-explain their issue, and 59% reported being transferred.

Mr. Berman would have been in both groups. He explained the same thing in writing, over and over, to four different people.

The hotel never lost the argument. It lost the guest. Ask yourself whether he books again, and whether he mentions the hotel to a colleague. I’d bet no on both. He didn’t stop being polite, and he was gone anyway.

What do you do differently on the first contact?

Three habits, and none of them need a new tool.

Restate the request in your own words before you act on it. “You want us to stop leaving soap and take away what’s here, correct?” takes ten seconds. It would have ended the whole exchange on day one.

Own the outcome, not your slice of it. The relief maid could not fix the soap policy, but she could have written one line to the housekeeper that said what the guest had asked for. Every hand-off should carry the request, not just the action taken.

Fix the hand-offs in advance. If a request has to cross shifts or teams, decide who owns it before it arrives. I wrote about how an escalation matrix does exactly that, and the hotel’s problem is the case it exists to prevent.

Small problems are cheap on the first contact. By the fifth, you are paying for 54 bars of soap.

How do you find this problem in your own queue?

Pull the tickets with the most touches, not the lowest scores. Take ten that were reopened or passed between agents, and read the customer’s first message next to the last reply you sent.

Ask one question of each: did the last reply answer the first message? In my experience the answer is “no” more often than a team expects. The ticket closed, the SLA was met, and the customer’s actual request is still sitting unanswered three replies up the thread.

Then look at where the request got lost. It is usually a specific hand-off: shift change, tier one to tier two, support to billing. That is a process fix, not a coaching conversation with an agent. The hotel’s staff were not the problem. The gaps between them were.

Share what you find with the team as examples, without names. Agents recognise the pattern quickly once they see it written down, because most of them have received a reply like that from a company themselves.

Do this once a month with a different ten tickets each time. It costs an hour, and it will find things your dashboard cannot.

Frequently asked questions

How do you listen to your customers when the queue is under pressure?

Restate the request before you respond. It costs about ten seconds and stops the wrong fix from starting. Under volume pressure the temptation is to match the ticket to a category and reply, which is how the soap problem begins.

What is the difference between hearing and listening in customer service?

Hearing captures the words the customer used. Listening captures what they want to happen next. “Too much soap” is what was heard, and “give me my own soap back” is what needed to be done.

Why do customers have to repeat themselves so often?

Because hand-offs pass along the action taken rather than the original request. Each person answers their own slice, and the customer becomes the only one holding the whole story. The fix is a hand-off note that always carries the request in the customer’s terms.

How many hand-offs are too many?

Every hand-off is a chance to lose the request, so the target is as few as you can manage. Track how often customers are transferred or re-explain their issue, and treat any repeated explanation as a defect to be fixed at the source.

Hutch Morzaria

Hutch Morzaria is a CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building and leading support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has held Director-level roles at Q4 Inc, AudienceView, Johnson Controls, and others, and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.