As an eventual lawyer working in Dwellworks legal
department, customer service is not quite the same. For much of my life, I’ve worked in jobs with
very direct customer service: Wal Mart, Starbucks, the IT help desk in
college. For all of those jobs, it was a
matter of providing quick, friendly, and effective service, according to a set
protocol. New situations popped up from
time to time, but the majority of my interactions with customers were rote and
predictable: someone wanted a certain drink I’d made a million times, or
someone wanted wireless set up on their computer, etc. etc. It was even more repetitive whenever I had
the chance to be a cashier: ring up the items, take the payment, repeat, ad naseum.
I don’t mean to
disparage those jobs. They were good
jobs and I have a lot of respect for people with that kind of direct exposure to
the general consumer public day in and day out.
Some of the most spectacular people I’ve ever met are Starbucks
baristas.
But the world is different for me now. I’m getting more and more acclimated to life
as a lawyer. In law, we don’t really
have “customers.” We have clients. Here at Dwellworks, working in the legal
department makes the whole of Dwellworks, LLC our collective client. Oddly enough though, that mostly doesn’t
extend to the individual employees. It’s
literally for the legal entity known as Dwellworks pretty exclusively. So it’s a different sort of thing, going
through customer service training from this perspective, compared to everything
it had been in my working life up to this point.
MAGIC, the customer service training program Dwellworks
sends every single employee through, is unlike anything else I’d been through
in my other jobs. In fact, it’s
something a lot of lawyers should probably experience (but few ever will:
attorneys are pretty confident that they can do anything, so firms tend to be
very poorly run when it comes to business acumen and customer care: Law School
teaches you how to pass classes professors have made needlessly difficult; (seriously,
the material is tough enough without trickery and skullduggery in the exam fact
patters) not how to run a business or care about people). I’m glad that, even if I too go on to think I
can run a business with no actual training, I’ll have had MAGIC while here at
Dwellworks. Indeed, if I ever have the
chance, I’ll make every lawyer I’m in charge of go through it too.
MAGIC, you see, is not just “put on a happy face, the
customer should at least feel like they’re always right.” It’s “value the customer as a person, don’t
beat yourself or the company up over things you can’t control, and come to a
real solution for the real problem together.”
I’m very thankful for the practical steps in MAGIC; how to
answer the phone (greeting, name, department, offer to help, pick 3 but never
four), how to deliver bad news (in delicious meat-metaphors: empathy, bad news,
empathy-redirect). But it’s the broader
concept of the MAGIC training that I’ll carry forward in my professional life
most. Though there are words for the
acronym, it’s a 3 part idea: relationship, task, relationship. Who the person is will always be more
valuable than the task at hand. The task is sandwiched between caring for people
as human beings: even when things are not going well. That’s how to forge lasting relationships for
the benefit of everyone involved.
Striving to show the customer you care about them, despite
any bad outcomes that may be arising, is the key to all of MAGIC. But more than that, it’s the key to being a decent
human being. At the end of the day, that’s
what MAGIC distills into: being a decent human being to everyone you
encounter. Too often, that’s an idea of
a goal we can’t actually achieve. But
the MAGIC training we went through gives us some tools to put people first when
we’d not be inclined to do so. I’m very
thankful for it.
So much of the time, Attorneys take advantage of the fact
that you don’t have very many options.
Even the biggest corporations are stuck with selected counsel at a
certain point in any transaction or litigation.
That’s why legal fees can get so outrageous, and it’s why a law office
is often the most toxic environment you’ll find. Lawyers get paid whether they care about
their customers or not most of the time: just keep billing hours, even
needlessly, and the checks will roll in, win or lose, customer satisfaction or
not. But I don’t want to be that sort of
lawyer. Thanks to Dwellworks and the
MAGIC program, I don’t feel like I’ll have to be.
-Zack
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