“Fine” is the F-Bomb of Customer Service

Not long ago I was interviewing Kevin Berk, founder and CEO of ServiceGuru, on Amazing Business Radio. We were talking about the word “fine”. He commented that it is a four-letter word that begins with the letter F that you never want to hear from your customer. I then joked that fine is the “F-Bomb” of customer service.

Ask someone how their experience with your company is. If they say, “fine,” and you dig a little deeper, you may find out things really aren’t so fine.

I Googled the word fine and found that the word is an adjective that means “high quality.” That may be true if you’re talking about a “fine-looking haircut.” However, as just mentioned, that may not always be the case, especially when it comes to business and customer service.

• “How’s the food?” “Fine.”
• “How’s the service?” “Fine.”
• “How’s your experience? “Fine.”

If you owned a restaurant and asked your customer those questions, and their answer was, “fine,” how would you feel? You would know that there was a problem! You would need to ask a deeper question to understand how the customer really felt.

So, does fine really mean fine? NO!

Consider that the word fine is really an acronym that stands for:

F: Faking a smile
I: Insincere response
N: Never coming back
E: Emotionless

This all comes together in a bold statement I found while doing Internet research for this article. I found the following phrase on images, posters and funny T-shirts. I laughed out loud:

Fine is not fine! The scale goes Great, Good, Okay, Not Okay, I Hate You, Fine!

So, maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but it makes the point. “Fine” does not always mean “fine”! In customer service, “fine” means okay at best – average, trite, mundane and unimpressive. I think you get the idea. If you hear a customer say it is fine, it is time to move into service and relationship recovery mode.

I compare this to the concept of a “satisfied customer.” This is the customer that doesn’t complain, but doesn’t praise you either. This is the customer that will seldom, if ever, refer business to you. This is the customer that may not come back.

But we thought they were happy. Why? Because they didn’t complain. If they had, we could have made things right. But, that doesn’t mean the experience was great. Maybe things weren’t all that bad. Maybe there was nothing at all to complain about. Maybe things weren’t wrong, but they weren’t really right, either. Maybe they were just fine.