From Dean Zatkowsky

The word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek words for home and pain. More or less, nostalgia means the pain of going home. I thought of this as Paul and I spoke to a journalist about his perception that Kinko's customer service had declined in recent years. We could not comment directly on the subject, because neither of us has set foot in a Kinko's store for a very long time.

But the conversation reminded me that understanding people from different cultures is a nearly insurmountable obstacle. For example, business people who still cling to the command/control style of management cannot imagine why one would go to the trouble of measuring something and NOT use the results for punitive purposes. Herewith begins the rant:

Kinko's early reputation for customer service was largely related to speed. As late as the early 1990s, some people were still using thermal paper copiers, but even small xerographic copiers were agonizingly slow. Remember how the entire top section of some copiers would leisurely slide from side to side, rescanning the original once for each copy produced?

When people came to Kinko's for what they considered a big job, say 100 copies, and the copies were finished within two minutes and looked better than the original (which was often typed with an old ribbon or produced on a dot-matrix printer), it wowed the customer and the coworker. That shared sense of excitement was a bit of a bonding experience.

And the bonding was going on between highly educated people with a strong sense of community, too. Until the mid-to-late 80s, most Kinko's stores were still in college towns, and most coworkers were college students or recent graduates. Our busiest stores at that time were serving 300 customers a day, and orders of more than 1,000 copies were rare. The entire range of services was pretty much copying, comb- or strip- binding, and passport photos.

By the mid 1990s, we had expanded beyond campus communities, the busiest stores were serving upwards of 1,000 customers per day, and overnight orders of 100,000 copies or 5,000 booklets bound with fancy covers were not uncommon. We were still faster than any alternative, but it didn't feel fast. Moreover, the complexity of the jobs increased with the addition of services like perfect binding, graphic design, custom printing, cutting, folding, computer services, etc.  

With that complexity came many more opportunities for failure. One of our policies was "done right or done over." By the late 90s, some of my friends in Seattle referred to this policy as "done six times or done seven times," because we had learned that if you serve enough customers, you will meet a surprising number of people who cannot be satisfied. But we also learned that our machines and our coworkers were imperfect and under a lot of stress, and we made plenty of mistakes.

Customer loyalty is the key to profitability for a business with a nickel product, so we focused our training and management programs on the delivery of exceptional customer service. We wanted to reduce errors, but we also wanted to recover from inevitable errors. The customer comment postcard was an early outreach program, and customers were not shy about sharing praise or complaints in this manner. We used business reply mail, so it was expensive, but it was also a gold mine of useful information. Customers told us who was rude and who was heroic, and they gave us many ideas for new products and services, how to organize our paper selection so they could find what they needed at multiple locations, etc.

Then, Todd Ordal and Bill Capsalis at K-Graphics, the Kinko's partnership based in Colorado, developed a Service Quality Measurement (SQM) program. I immediately stole it for Kinko's Northwest. Coworkers in my office would receive a store's order forms every week or so, and then set about calling dozens (or hundreds) of the store's customers to poll them about their experience. On a scale from 1-10, they rated the speed of service, courtesy of coworkers, quality of final product, etc. Then we asked for overall comments and ideas for new products and services.

I tried to express to the journalist that HOW we used this information changed when Kinko's consolidated its partnerships into a single company. At Kinko's Northwest, we viewed SQM as a store improvement program and a source of marketing ideas. Results were for the store manager, who could act on the information immediately. Instead of using the data to compare stores, we offered the information as a means for EACH store to continuously improve their customer relationships. We uncovered dissatisfied customers and re-won their allegiance. We learned which of our services were unknown or misunderstood. We discovered which coworkers should be working with machines rather than with customers.   You get the idea.

But after the corporate roll-up, SQM scores became part of a national ranking system for stores/managers. The objective was not continuous improvement at the store level, but the use of public praise and humiliation to cow managers and exert central authority. The score became more important than the information. Before the roll-up, SQM was a joint problem-solving exercise between store management and the home office. After the roll-up, SQM was an expensive, labor-intensive rating system that allowed Aeron-chair-bound executives in Ventura to demand the firing of people they'd never met in stores they'd never visited. They turned the program into a pogrom.

Which brings me back to cultural conflict. The new corporate masters at Kinko's were simply seeking a more efficient way to control a far-flung empire. But there's a huge difference between control and management, and therefore between efficiency and effectiveness. Before the roll-up, we did a lot of very inefficient things to keep our coworkers engaged and excited.  So-called executives like myself spent most of our time in the stores, listening to coworkers and customers. We had full-time coworkers devoted to interviewing customers. We had a good reputation for customer service AND we were making plenty of money. Could it be that efficiency is a false idol? I think so, but if you go around tearing down other people's idols, don't be surprised to find yourself exiled.