Recently I had to go get some work done on my vehicle. When I entered the facility (for my scheduled appointment) I was told very matter of factly…
This might not fix the issue, it could, but it won’t be perfect.
My first thoughts immediately going to – “but you’re the guys who fix these things, with all the commercials that you’re the best, with all the ads all over the country, with all amazing customer service… I went through the wizard and checked my vehicle, you said it’d be perfect.”
But this guy didn’t get the memo…
Was he rude? No.
Was he disingenuous? No.
Did he mislead me? No.
But he was off message and that is a huge problem whether your team is 2, 10, 100 or 10,000. If one person is off message it doesn’t matter because now the message has become a confusing mess of last night’s nachos. Imagine 4 coaches on the soccer field all yelling different things to do, all directed towards the same player – what do they do?
Now to this guy’s credit, he was 100% honest and he gave me the option of backing out. In essence he was saying – “I know that is the message we push out, but it’s not the one we need to send, the issue is more complex”.
I still had my vehicle fixed, knowing what I was going in to get done so that was all good. And if the goal is to be fixing something on the first call and never go back, then the muddled message doesn’t matter but in this case. But, it could happen again and the question now becomes, with one hand saying one thing and another saying something very different will it spurn me to go look somewhere else next time?
Yes.
And in the end that was the message that was sent – “We’re not on the same page, go look somewhere else”.
