Extreme customer service: Not all need apply

I pulled into the parking lot and looked in my rearview mirror. There stood a young woman at her open hatchback, watching while two veterinary techs struggled to lift a large dog on a blanket from the car. She was crying, praying and begging out loud the way people do when faced with crisis. It was quite a scene, and so I decided to stay in my car until the situation was a bit more settled down.

The two employees managed to lift the dog in order to move it into the animal clinic. The young woman retrieved a baby carrier from the back seat and followed them inside. I was also at this vet to visit my cat before I left town for three days. She had been struggling with liver problems, yet now things were looking up, so I was a bit more optimistic than I had been for several days.

As I walked in, there was blood all over the parking lot, entryway and waiting room. No matter how many gory movies you may have watched in your life, there is nothing as unnerving as experiencing the real thing.

And this is when the interaction between the staff and the dog owner became interesting.

The owner was sobbing as her baby sat quietly, not really sure what to make of all this. Three staff members behind the counter cleaned up the blood and continued dealing with the woman, and began dealing with me and another customer.

The distraught dog owner called her husband and explained, “I just opened the front door and he ran out! I wasn’t quick enough to grab his collar and the car hit him.”

Oh my. No matter how jaded you may have become in life, witnessing someone upset and in pain can be very emotional. Once she finished her calls, she sat down. I walked over and handed her a tissue. I had a purse full of them for whatever my own potential emotional roller coaster had in store for me regarding my own furry friend. She thanked me and continued to sob.

The doctor came out and told her that the dog was in bad shape, and asked her to accompany her to the back. Those of us in the waiting room sighed deeply in unison.

The three staff people then refocused their attention and took turns heading to the back to see when I could go see my cat, Zoë, since the injured dog was right by her cage.

Were I not leaving town, I probably would have left and returned later when this shattering experience calmed down. But honestly, I wanted to watch how this team would handle the rest of this “extreme customer transaction.” Call it strange, but given my line of work, I am always curious to observe and learn what people do with staff that experience trauma, negativity and abuse – because it truly hits home for us in our day-to-day work at the BBB.

I waited almost half an hour, but that was OK with me because I had the opportunity to listen to the staff chat and deal with what they were feeling. I saw them compassionately collect the bill from the dog’s owner after she said her final goodbyes.

When all calmed down, my vet, the same one who took the young woman back to say goodbye to her dog, came out and signaled that it was okay to go visit Zoë. We chatted about her improving health, and then I took the opportunity to comment about the skill the front line staff showed in this situation. I really think the back room assistants were trained to manage trauma. But the individuals setting appointments and answering the phones were simply not the same breed (pun intended) as professionals with medical training.

There are some valuable lessons I derived from this experience regarding this particular form of extreme customer service:

“Your frontline staff needs a place to regroup when faced with a crisis at work.

“Even if your team operates like a well-oiled machine in an emergency situation, it is the aftermath that we often gloss over.

“High-stress situations need a relief valve. Do you have one?

“It can be easy to overlook the effects when something challenges your workplace.

“Not all front lines are ready to deal with emotional crisis.

“Even if a crisis is happening in another department or to someone personally, we are all, in some respects, as a unit, interconnected, so the effects may be more widespread than you realize.

On my way out of the clinic, I stopped and chatted with the three front desk staffers. I asked them how often this kind of thing happened, and they replied not often. One staffer had been there just five months and was still shaken. She told me one of the reasons she had to keep heading to the back room was to simply pull herself together. The others agreed and said it was very hard not to cry.

I praised them all for how well they handled themselves, and somehow, they seemed somewhat embarrassed by how emotional they still were. I was, too. Not by the level of emotion they were showing, but by my own. It is a bit odd how sometimes we are uncomfortable showing sorrow, even when it is warranted.

But as I walked out the door, I told them if they ever got to the point where they didn’t feel for everyone in the scene we just witnessed, they probably needed to think about looking for a new job.