Great service mindsets

I received a compliment at work to-day.

You have to understand, it wasn't one of those hair-so-pretty compliments. A customer I had tended to wrote in to my bosses to sing my praises. I didn't know this because I access the generic inbox and hadn't seen the email chain which I'd been CCed to. But I knew something was up when a couple of the older ladies beckoned me over and whispered "you got compliment, ah?"

Strange, I'm still in customer service, just a different mode, is all. Why shouldn't we delight customers all the time? It didn't hit home how rare this was until I heard one supervisor tell the manager from another section "Z sit there for years and never got one single compliment!"

Z has been tending the emails for 8, let me repeat, 8 bloody years. 8 years, doing a hundred emails a day, and not a single compliment? I find that hard to believe. Either that, or my erstwhile colleagues really aren't capable of understanding the attitude that lies behind terrific service rendered.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, service is about attitude. Don't mouth the formulas at customers. Don't slight them with your platitudes. Customers in general aren't stupid, regardless of your target market. Training will take the rough edges off a person but that's all it is.


If you don't have the right mindset, you're going to suck magnificently at it.