Cultivating Respect and Valuing Time: The Keys to Excellent Customer Service
Oct 02, 2023Season 4Episode 48
Seasons Leadership Program
Join us for this special discussion on customer service and leadership.
Show Notes: We talk about how excellent leaders care about their customers. We share examples of exceptional customer service, and not so exceptional. Breaking down what sets these examples apart, we challenge leaders to really consider who is your customer? Next, we talk about loyalty and how the cast of a leader’s shadow can affect how the organization treats their customers – either positively or negatively. Our discussion concludes with a call to action: Look at your organization through the eyes of your customer.
Join Debbie Collard and Susan Ireland, certified coaches and co-founders of Seasons Leadership, in making positive leadership the norm rather than the exception on Wednesdays on the Seasons Leadership Podcast. (Selected by Feedspot as one of the Top 15 Positive Leadership Podcasts on the web!)
And now you can join our community of values-based leaders on Seasons Leadership Patreon at Patreon.com/seasonsleadership. At our gold-level, unlock our exclusive Lessons in Leadership Column from our Resident Seasoned Leader David Spong, a lifetime member of the Board of the Malcom Baldrige Foundation and our Leadership Elements Series.
Join us for this special discussion on customer service and leadership.
Show Notes: We talk about how excellent leaders care about their customers. We share examples of exceptional customer service, and not so exceptional. Breaking down what sets these examples apart, we challenge leaders to really consider who is your customer? Next, we talk about loyalty and how the cast of a leader’s shadow can affect how the organization treats their customers – either positively or negatively. Our discussion concludes with a call to action: Look at your organization through the eyes of your customer.
Join Debbie Collard and Susan Ireland, certified coaches and co-founders of Seasons Leadership, in making positive leadership the norm rather than the exception on Wednesdays on the Seasons Leadership Podcast. (Selected by Feedspot as one of the Top 15 Positive Leadership Podcasts on the web!)
And now you can join our community of values-based leaders on Seasons Leadership Patreon at Patreon.com/seasonsleadership. At our gold-level, unlock our exclusive Lessons in Leadership Column from our Resident Seasoned Leader David Spong, a lifetime member of the Board of the Malcom Baldrige Foundation and our Leadership Elements Series.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to fall with the Seasons Leadership Podcast, where we recognize the time in your leadership journey to integrate new insights and knowledge. Throughout the seasons, we'll bring you actionable advice to improve your leadership and life today. Thank you for joining me, Susan Ireland and my co-host, Debbie Collard. As certified leadership coaches and co-founders of Seasons Leadership, we share a vision to make excellent leadership the worldwide standard. Learn more at seasonsleadershipcom. Join us in making positive leadership the norm rather than the exception. By listening and engaging in discussions featured on this podcast, you help us bring leadership excellence to the world. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, thank you to everybody for joining us today. Speaking of leadership excellence our topic today. What good leaders do is they care about their customers, because why are you in business If you don't have any customers? There's no need for you to be a business. You need to take care of those customers. Our topic today is near and dear to my heart, although, susan, I would say that wasn't always true. Early in my career, not only did I not care about much about customer service, I would have trouble describing who our customers were. I just knew here's my job, this is my boss. Make boss happy. That was the process.
Speaker 1:
Right, I wouldn't say you didn't care about it. You just didn't think about it. I didn't think about it.
Speaker 2:
It wasn't on my radar screen at all. And then, relatively early in the career though, I got into a thing. I was always getting brought up to do these special projects that nobody else wanted to do. We've talked about that. In other aspects. It was good for me because I learned new things by doing this. One of those things was this thing called Knock their Socks Off Training that the company had invested in. I know a funny name, right.
Speaker 1:
I don't remember that training.
Speaker 2:
So it might have been localized, who knows. But they had made a big investment, brought in these consultants going to train you in customer satisfaction. Knock their Socks Off, despite the fact that it had a funny name. The training was kind of interesting because they put us in a call center environment and had us take a call from a customer. They were pretending to be the customer and then played back to us what we did right in the call, what we didn't do so well, how we could do it better. It was pretty good.
Speaker 2:
But the biggest thing out of that was I started paying attention. It's like wait, who's my customer? My customer isn't just the end customer of the product or service of the organization I work on. I also have customers inside. So someone in a different function or a different, if you look at a process and who I hand my stuff off to is my customer. So I started paying attention to all that kind of stuff and I was like, wow, this is kind of trippy that there's all these customers for me to pay attention to. But I also started paying more attention to customer service. I received yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
Well, you know we can get going on this, because there are so many examples of customer service that to be nice might be less than optimal. You're being way too nice.
Speaker 2:
There are some really crappy customer service out there, I know it.
Speaker 1:
I know it.
Speaker 2:
Or non-existent, yeah. But then there's on the other side of the teeter totter. There's great customer service examples as well. I mean a few come to mind. I'm sure they do for anybody who thinks about this for a few minutes. But you know, eating in restaurants I embarrass my family all the time because if we don't get good customer service then I wouldn't always. In the past I might rumble about it but I wouldn't take any overreaction or do anything. But now I do. I go talk to somebody and I'm not mean or anything else. I just point out that this was less than optimal and what they could do about it. But I had a really good example recently where I pointed out and it wasn't because of customer service issue to start with, but the result was some good customer service. So mother nature, caused via a hurricane, caused a cruise I was going to be going on to not happen. So I called the cruise line to say, hey, I know you guys can't control the weather, but anyway we could get a refund for this and they were very nice. Ultimately I did get a refund, but even if I hadn't, the point is they were. They took care of me as a customer, they cared about me. I felt they cared about me in the way they responded to me In a not so other side of the example just today this morning, my husband has been getting referred to a specialist for an issue he's got going on and it's not life threatening or anything like that.
Speaker 2:
But they had scheduled him, then forgot about the appointment. Then he went in for the appointment today and they said oh no, the doctor's not even here. We're not planning to do that today, we're just going to talk to you. And he was very upset rightly so, because you're making the customers in that sort of situation feel like you don't care one way or the other what they're doing. You're just doing your own thing.
Speaker 1:
Or that their time is more valuable than yours. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know, and it's funny because unfortunately I think bad customer service is more the norm, or at least it feels that way. I just think of all the things on the computer. You want to get an answer and you can't even call anybody anymore. You're trying to follow the form and it's like what's your problem or something, and your problem isn't there, and so then you're trying to write it in and think they don't even want to talk to me or there's no avenue to actually get this resolved. It just keeps kicking down the road, you know. So it's so infuriating. But what the? I mean? It's just everywhere and there's really. I think my blood starts to boil and I can get emotional about this. But what it does do is when I have good customer service, it's like so refreshing and I am loyal. So if somebody actually talks to me and I know, even if it's not really the answer that I want, if I feel heard and respected, and cared about as a customer right yeah.
Speaker 2:
And let's face it people have choices. They have more choices today than ever before about who they want to do business with, what types of organizations they want to do business with, and leaders who don't get it that customer service is important can find themselves without a business. Right, because it directly impacts your bottom line, directly impacts it, right, and so people can say they can vote with their feet. Like you said, I can just go somewhere else and get better customer service and be loyal to that new place. I went Right, and then you're not going to get me away from them, right, but let's talk about this for a second.
Speaker 2:
Who's responsible for customer service? Right, right.
Speaker 1:
Right, it's you know. Oh, sorry about that. I don't know if you heard that, but good, you didn't. Everybody's responsible for customer service, right? We all. Like you said, our customers are not just the end of the line person who's buying the product or service. Right, it's, everybody along the line. So actually, as a leader, you know, I am responsible for customer service for everybody who works for me right, absolutely, you know, you said it well.
Speaker 2:
Everyone's responsible for it. However, the leader, the top leadership, is ultimately responsible because it's tightly coupled to the culture of the organization. So if the leader doesn't care about customer service, guess what? The people aren't going to make it a priority either.
Speaker 1:
It's true, and even further, that if the leader says customer service is important in words, but is treating their organization in a way that does not respect the employees, they don't respect their time or their efforts, or they don't give them the resources needed to do their job, that shadow is going to overcome the whole organization and the people who work for that leader are going to be treating their customers, whether it's the final end customer or somebody else along the process the same way, right because it's not walking the talk.
Speaker 2:
In that case example you gave right the leader is saying one thing and doing another, and people notice that. So you have to be authentic as a leader in. Okay, here's how I say I want things done and I demonstrate that same way of doing things, not the opposite, not the opposite. A great example of customer service and everybody will have heard of this one is the Ritz Carlton Hotel Chain. The company is known for their what they call their gold standard of customer service and in that they have a motto ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen, and they expect every employee to be ready to serve the customer at any time and give them a great customer experience, one of their five principles. I love this. I think we may consider adopting it.
Speaker 2:
Deliver well yes that is and it's about the ultimate guest experience. And they do. They walk the talk there. They do daily standups in every department. Yes, the leader is responsible for making those happen and for doing the same things, demonstrating what they want the rest of the employees to do underneath of them.
Speaker 2:
And so I happened to have the pleasure of being on a board with Hork Schultz when he was the CEO of the Ritz Carlton and he told this story and he said we had a electrician changing a light bulb, changing light bulbs throughout one of the hotels, and a customer came up to him at the bottom of the ladder and said excuse me, I can't find anybody I need. The electrician really got down off the ladder immediately, safely, and helped the customer. He wasn't in charge of that. He could have said oh I'm sorry, that's not my department, you need to go talk to blah, blah, blah. But he didn't. He helped the person and he helped them to the point where they were handed off to another person with him standing there, and he made sure their problem was going to get resolved. Then he went back to changing his light bulbs. So it just goes to show you that that permeates and is baked into the culture of the Ritz-Carlton organization, and that's what leaders need to do if they truly care about customer service, which they could.
Speaker 1:
Right, it really reminds me. Sometimes I hear from people that I coach like I've got a problem in my organization. I don't like the attitude or we're not. We need more accountability or something that needs improvement. Well, really, the first question is how are you demonstrating that, right? Yeah, it's a little bit odd If you don't care about it.
Speaker 2:
no one else will, it's true. And conversely, if you do care about something and demonstrate that, everyone will. It's true and therefore it will be part of the culture. Right Employees watch what leaders. We've said this a million times. Right Employees watch what leaders do and say all the time, even when you don't know that they're watching, and that tells those employees what you're focused on and what you care about as a leader, what's important to you. So they just have to walk the talk and their actions every single day.
Speaker 1:
Right, and sometimes I mean leaders are busy, they've got a lot on their plate, they're fighting fires, and I remember feeling this way sometimes is like who is paying attention to me? I'm just doing my job, just like everybody else, but it is the fact that people do pay attention, and getting in the weeds takes you away from seeing things on a higher level. Leaders need to be more self-aware, I think, than anybody and I just wanna put in a plug for a coach because we don't give ourselves time to reflect and really think about these things. So, yeah, so I think we have, don't we have a challenge for leaders or a call to action? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:
Think here's the call to action Go, take a look at your own organization. Be introspective. Take a look at like how do I act, what do I say? I'm gonna do my actions match what I'm saying to the people in my organization. And try to look at your organization out of body experience here, but through the eyes of the customer. Right, if someone's just seeing my organization for the first time or experiencing what we provide for the first time, what kind of experience are they having? You can use a secret shopper. There's lots of methods by which you could do this, but the call to action is do it. Go, check it out and be ready to see where things may not be working Like. Are there issues that your customers may be experiencing that you had no idea about? Because not knowing is not an excuse Exactly.
Speaker 1:
I think, really, what you're saying is boots on the ground. It's really important to go and experience what your customers or your employees are really experiencing like today. I know the world is changing so fast, work is changing so fast that sometimes I think we forget and we think that, oh, I was successful when I had this job, I was coming up in the organization or whatever, and so it's still possible to do that now. I think the technology is different, the environment's different, the people have different choices, and so it's really important to stay current. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
And the only way to do is get boots on the ground and find out what's happening and have a regular process to do that right.
Speaker 2:
Yes, yes. So that's our call to action from season's leadership get out there, figure out what your customers are experiencing and what kind of example you, as the leader, are setting. What shadow you're casting us is, I would say, right, though. Okay. Well, thank you, listeners, for joining us for the season's leadership podcast today. We hope you're able to take these words of excellence with you to help strengthen the organizations and communities and your leadership in which you leave them work. And we have a special bonus announcement today Please join us for a free live webinar with seasoned leader David Spong.
Speaker 2:
It's gonna be held from five to 6 pm Pacific time on October 17th. That's coming up in just a few weeks here. By hosting this live, free event, we're hoping to connect with leaders at all levels that are part of our season's leadership community or on our subscriber list and beyond. So please forward it to other people. Bring a friend if you come to the live event, because it's a great opportunity to talk to David about how to create a successful culture of your team. You can talk to him about customer satisfaction. Get his take on it. How to establish a leadership filter. David writes for us in a Patreon exclusive column Lessons in Leadership, which is wonderful, and you can get those two by joining and subscribing to our community on Patreon. Visit patroncom slash seasons leadership. To sign up, david will answer your questions, live about his career and his best leadership advice. So don't miss it Until next time. We're sending you positivity for integrating the new insights into your leadership and life. Thank you for joining us.