If you want exceptional and effective customer service, you must have a “customer service culture”. The old training manual isn’t enough. To be effective, your business has to teach customer service by example. Your employees won’t arrive all full of customer service attitudes. But they will jump on the band wagon when they observe how things are done in your organization. So it’s up to the people at the top to practice the right procedures.

If employees sense or see that there is genuine concern for customers, they will automatically pick up on this and adopt the attitude. They’ll want to fit in. I’ve watched my own employees do this.

You must be careful and not dictate customer service. It’s a skill that must be learned through experience and observation. I’m not implying that some people don’t have a natural instinct for delivering good service, but most will have to learn this skill. That is just the way the world works. So your job is to teach this skill by example. Remember, it’s not hard to learn great customer service as long as it is imbedded in your company culture. If your policies are dictated and listed in “a manual” they will seem like a chore and as we know, chores can at times come up against resistance.

We all know that one of the biggest hurdles we come up against that challenges excellent service is abusive, unreasonable, customers. Here’s what I have to say about that. ” The sun shines, The sky is blue, Water is wet, People will abuse you”. These are facts of life so don’t complain about them, and live with it! You’ll  have to initiate what  I call Operation Duck’s Back where you let the abuse roll off your back just as water rolls off a duck’s back.

The good news is if you have a customer oriented culture, you will train your people (by example), to deliver the customer service that will keep those customers coming back to you.