Every Company Needs a ‘Reasonable Department’

This article answers the question: What is a “Reasonable Department,” and why does every company need one?

Answer: A Reasonable Department is a customer service mindset that empowers employees to use judgment, empathy, and common sense when a customer’s situation falls outside of standard policies or procedures.

Most companies have standard operating procedures for just about everything. That’s good. Processes create consistency, efficiency and predictability. But what happens when a customer’s situation doesn’t fit into the process?

I recently wrote about this idea in a Forbes article after attending the largest industry meeting of CX leaders in the world, Customer Contact Week (CCW), one of the keynote speakers, Bryan Stoller, Global VP of Customer Care at United Airlines, asked a simple but powerful question:

“What’s the standard operating procedure for things that don’t have a standard operating procedure?”

His answer was something he calls the Reasonable Department.  

As Stoller explained, this is “the place where judgment, context and empathy come together. This is the place where we handle the hard stuff.”  

The “hard stuff” is what we’re not used to or haven’t experienced (yet). Most customer interactions are routine. Self-service customer support, sometimes fueled by AI, and well-trained employees can handle the routine questions and problems efficiently. But every company eventually has a situation or issue that doesn’t neatly fit into a policy operations manual. Maybe it’s a customer who has a unique circumstance. Maybe a process breaks down. Sometimes, following the rules could create a terrible customer experience. 

That’s when companies (and people) need to stop asking, “What does the policy say?,” and start asking, “What’s the reasonable thing to do?”

Stoller described the strategy in four simple steps: 

1. Detect: Recognize when an issue falls outside of the norm. 

2. Route: Be sure to send the problem to the person or the department with the right expertise to handle the issue. 

3. Resolve: This is where employees get to use their judgment versus trying to follow rules for something that falls outside of the norm. 

4. Learn: Every unusual situation is an opportunity to learn and improve. Ask why it happened, how to handle it if it happens again, and whether the problem can be prevented from happening in the future. 

What I like most about this idea is that the Reasonable Department isn’t really a department. It’s just like customer service isn’t a department. It’s a mindset. It shouldn’t be hard for a customer to find someone willing to use common sense to solve an unusual problem or circumstance. Every organization should intentionally train people how to deal with unique situations that have reasonable solutions, even if they fall outside of the typical issues.  

In the past, I’ve written about a concept called One to Say Yes, Two to Say No. The idea is to empower people to use their common sense to do what’s right for the customer. If they can’t come up with what to do on their own or feel that they have to say no, that’s when they talk to the manager.    

Customers rarely remember the transactions that went exactly as they were supposed to, but they almost always remember how you handled the situations that didn’t.