Manners and Customer Service

Someone recently posed the question to me, "Can we get "jerks" to give good Customer Service? I mean with the overall decline in manners, how can we expect service to be excellent?"

Whew. There is a lot of beliefs dripping around the edges of that question!

My first point would be that if you think you have "jerks" on your team - or think that "jerks" are all you can find to hire, that you are in deep you-know-what before you ever move forward. Leaders need to have a positive expectation of people first and foremost. But let me get off my soapbox there and talk about the rest of the question - which hinges on the connection between manners and Customer Service.

While there's definitely a connection between customer service and manners, good customer service is about a lot more than good manners alone. Good Customer Service requires processes and procedures and tools that will enable good Customer Service. It requires leadership that makes customer service a priority and that empowers employees who work directly with Clients and Customers to make decisions.

Often leaders have expectations about how the Customer will be treated but never share those expectations with employees. They may be thinking "this is so obvious; we don't need to focus on this with our people because they know how to treat others."

Great Customer Service is more than knowing how to treat people; it's more than being nice. It's having processes and procedures in place from the beginning. It's knowing what to do - plus knowing how and when to do it. Customer service declines within an organization when those in leadership positions decline to make customer service a priority.

Those were my initial thoughts to the question posed to me... What do you think?