Successes, Failures, Commentary, and Ramblings

A friend and I were talking about an experience he deals with in his business. Basically he finds that his customers fall into three categories:

1. Happy Customers
2. Unhappy Customers Effective at Rectifying their Unhappiness
3. Unhappy Customers Ineffective at Rectifying their Unhappiness

We were analyzing how customers control their own destiny in achieving their category, but that the behaviors that lead to achievement of the categories are not behaviors that are taught in any classroom either of us had ever been in.

Some call these behaviors “people skills,” others call it “savvy,” but I call it “social engineering.”

It’s the behaviors that a person uses to interact with other people in order to get what they want.

I witnessed a situation at the airport this past weekend that I think demonstrates the key principles:

My flight was delayed and after boarding and sitting on the plane for an hour, all the passengers were forced to get back off the plane and arrange a new schedule with the airline representative.

The first few passengers worked quickly, and methodically through their options with the representative. Then the next passenger took a different approach.

When he was told his flight options, he began screaming at the representative that her airline was causing him a terrible inconvenience, not to mention lost money, etc.

As you can imagine, he had a very difficult time arranging for a new flight schedule.

I am asserting that his difficulty in arranging a new flight schedule was not primarily due to his particular needs being greater or more difficult than the other passengers, but rather due to his inability to engineer the social interaction between himself and the airline representative.

What I learned from the effective social engineers (first few passengers in line):

• Asking pointed questions politely allows the representative a guilt-free opportunity to add on options that she previously failed to identify
• Offering empathy toward the representative’s stressful task of having to reschedule an entire plane full of passengers without any help was quickly reciprocated in the representative being empathetic to the inconvenienced passengers social engineers
• Openly disclosing to the representative that the social engineers were also leveraging the assistance of their travel agent via phone put the representative slightly at ease, and simultaneously sparked a sense of urgency for the representative – almost as if the rep wanted to beat the travel agent to the solution in a little race!

What I learned from the ineffective social engineer (the screaming passenger):

• Speaking loudly and rudely to the representative drew attention from all sorts of people in the area, and caused the representative to become openly / loudly defensive, distracting her from the ultimate task of finding the best alternative flight schedule
• Hiding efforts to identify a solution with a travel agent from the representative led to confusion by the representative and hesitation to pull the trigger on booking the best alternative flight selection
• Making big body movements such as dramatic paces to and from the representatives station tempted the representative into moving on to service the next passenger in line who looked to be less intimidating and therefore more appealing as someone to serve, again slowing and hampering progress of finding the best possible flight schedule.

These lessons learned I think really boil down to a few key principles that you need to know and understand in order to be effective as a social engineer.

1. Recognize what is flexible and what is rigid – in this example, flights around the world are not going to reschedule themselves to accommodate one passenger.
2. People like being a part of a solution, but hate being a part of a problem – the representative wants to be the one that saves the day by finding a flight schedule that you are happy with, but hates to be the one drawing attention at the center of an angry screaming person
3. People operate within their normal constraints unless shown how not to – the representative assumed that everyone’s final destination was that of the final destination in her airline’s reservation, but when a customer said “I can fly to XYZ instead of ABC if there are good options,” the representative was able to open up a whole new set of potential solutions

Social engineering can do a lot more than minimize your travel delays in case of a flustered airline representative. Here are a few other recent instances of how I think being an effective social engineer has helped me:

• Politely thanking an administrative assistant by name evoked her to offer “next time you need xyz, just let me know I have access to the calendar!” Had I not thanked her, she would most likely not have even verbalized a goodbye as I walked past.
• Surprising my fiance with a small bouquet of flowers seemed to buy me some lee-way in chowing down on sweets which she normally would harass me about.
• Asking “is everything ok?” of someone who forgot about a scheduled appointment (instead of getting angry at them over it) spurred them to fit me in quickly rather than just cancel the appointment.

Although, sometimes social engineering requires being stern, perhaps even loud and borderline rude:

• As a soccer referee, if a tactical foul was made early in the game I would purposely establish my presence and control by exclaiming loud enough for all the players to hear, “NOT TODAY!” in attempt to proactively prevent repeated offenses.
• On many consulting projects I rudely pointed out errors in peer’s work in order to embarrass my peer into fixing the errors prior to the client seeing them and discrediting our collective efforts.

Here’s the bottom line: consciously considering multiple behavior options in interpersonal communication can yield great results. Social engineering FTW!

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