The Three Rules of Road House Are Making Customer Service More Machine-like

We used to worry about “The Machines” taking over. Books have been written, movies have been made. We’ve long complained that conducting business transactions through machine self-help results in loss of the care, concern and good judgment that only humans can bring.

Well, we may not have to wait for the machine take-over because at least in some cases, people are acting more and more like machines.

Everybody’s seen Road House, the 1989 movie starring the late Patrick Swayze as an itinerant “security specialist,” hired to show the bouncers how to clean up a bar that’s been overrun with violence. In his effort to bring consistency to the bouncers’ response to incidents, he calls a meeting and instructs them to always apply three simple rules: 1. Never underestimate your opponent, 2. Take it outside, and 3. Be nice. Best practices, applied routinely and with machine-like consistency.

As the movie became a cult favorite, business writers and bloggers — myself included — desperate to appropriate any fragment of popular culture as “applesauce” for their workplace advice bromides, have grabbed onto the three rules laid down by Swayze’s Dalton character.

Fast forward to my recent interaction with a favorite store. I thought I was giving a pretty simple bit of customer feedback. The 60-capsules bottle of vitamins was marked at $21.99 and the bottle of 120 was marked at $49.99. Something didn’t add up. So I pointed it out to the store associate. His response: “I’m not in charge of pricing.” Not the “Gee, that’s weird. I’ll have someone take a look” I was hoping for.

So, I sent an email to the company. They missed the point too, and assumed I was complaining that the price wasn’t competitive with other stores. Their response: “Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We do a great deal of comparison-shopping and industry research to ensure that we are offering competitive prices. I’ll make sure to pass on your concerns about these specific items so we can take a look at prices in your area.”

Next, I called the customer service help line. The rep was very friendly, courteous and respectful, but he wasn’t about to get into the weeds of the issue either. He echoed the store rep’s disclaimer that he doesn’t make pricing decisions. When I took him through the math of 2x 60 and 2x $21.99, and asked him whether he agreed there was something strange about the prices, the best he could come up with was “maybe there are some additional taxes on the 120 bottle.” 

What’s going on here that has anything to do with the three rules of Road House?

The company has trained its reps to mechanically and dispassionately distance themselves from the real problem by responding to the inquiry with a machine-like, pre-programmed routine with its own versions of the three rules as its guiding principles:

Never underestimate your opponent. This is a battle: The customer vs. the company. Defend the existing company practice. Treat every customer inquiry as a complaint. Problem: This completely ignores the possibility that the company might actually learn something from the interaction. Maybe the 60-capsule bottle is actually underpriced and is the one that should be corrected.

Take it outside. “I’m not the one you should be talking with. I’m not responsible.” Who is? Nobody you can talk to. Problem: The issue is not outside and cannot be resolved out there — it’s inside. Inside the company. But the rep has been told it’s his job to keep the problem — and you — away from the inside where the people live who might actually understand the inquiry and be able to fix it.

Be nice. Courtesy is king. Your best weapon is to be friendly. Grit your teeth. No matter what they say. Problem: The rep is programmed to use nice-ness as a wall between himself and the customer.  Sure, everyone should be nice. But when the rep is essentially saying to herself  “La, La, La. I can’t hear you” just so they can stay calm and nice, that makes it impossible for any kind of real back-and-forth engagement to take place.

As if this mutated adaptation of the rules of Road House wasn’t bad enough, there’s another machine-like tool customer service reps have been trained to use that makes true resolution impossible:

Select responses from pre-packaged options. Reps have been trained to see customer complaints as neatly falling into categories, and that each category of complaint warrants a pre-set response deemed appropriate to that category. Simple, right? Of course not. Problem: This takes thinking out of the equation. The three reps I spoke to would not — could not, even for a moment — step out of their tightly scripted roles to think about the problem before responding. 

Maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at training for customer service reps and anyone who faces off with the customer. Here are some better alternatives to the rules of Road House for real-life situations with customers:

• The customer is not your opponent. Don’t assume every inquiry is a complaint. Each inquiry from a customer is unique and should be treated that way.
• Take it inside. Try hard to understand the problem and then take it to someone inside the company who can do something about it. Every interaction with a customer can yield valuable information we can use for this customer’s benefit, the benefit of other customers generally — and to improve our own practices.
• Be nice, sure, but… Don’t have the rep use the discipline of steeling himself to forced niceness as a barrier to real communication and engagement with the most important person to our business.
• Use pre-packaged responses only as templates and guidelines and use them only after real consideration of the specific facts of the case.