Customer Service Reader

Good people make good service. Good service makes good people.

Listed below are competencies extracted from the Emotional Competence Framework of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. They are the competencies that matter most to the success of customer service providers. Conversely, when we practice service - whether on customers, family members, colleagues, or communities - we become better at these competencies. We become better people.

Outstanding customer service providers:

• Realize the links between their feelings and what they think, do, and say
• Have a guiding awareness of their values and goals
• Are reflective, learning from experience
• Are open to candid feedback, new perspectives, continuous learning, and self-development
• Are able to show a sense of humor and perspective about themselves
• Can voice views that are unpopular and go out on a limb for what is right
• Are decisive, able to make sound decisions despite uncertainties and pressures
• Manage their impulsive feelings and distressing emotions well
• Stay composed, positive, and unflappable even in trying moments
• Think clearly and stay focused under pressure
• Act ethically and are above reproach
• Build trust through their reliability and authenticity
• Admit their own mistakes
• Meet commitments and keep promises
• Hold themselves accountable for meeting their objectives
• Are organized and careful in their work
• Smoothly handle multiple demands, shifting priorities, and rapid change
• Adapt their responses and tactics to fit fluid circumstances
• Seek out fresh ideas from a wide variety of sources
• Entertain original solutions to problems
• Generate new ideas
• Are results-oriented, with a high drive to meet their objectives and standards
• Set challenging goals and take calculated risks
• Pursue information to reduce uncertainty and find ways to do better
• Learn how to improve their performance
• Readily make personal or group sacrifices to meet a larger organizational goal
• Find a sense of purpose in the larger mission
• Pursue goals beyond what’s required or expected of them
• Cut through red tape and bend the rules when necessary to get the job done
• Persist in seeking goals despite obstacles and setbacks
• Are attentive to emotional cues and listen well
• Show sensitivity and understand others’ perspectives
• Help out based on understanding other people’s needs and feelings
• Understand customers’ needs and match them to services or products
• Seek ways to increase customers’ satisfaction and loyalty
• Gladly offer appropriate assistance
• Grasp a customer’s perspective, acting as a trusted advisor
• Are skilled at persuasion
• Fine-tune presentations to appeal to the listener
• Are effective in give-and-take, registering emotional cues in attuning their message
• Deal with difficult issues straightforwardly
• Handle difficult people and tense situations with diplomacy and tact
• Orchestrate win-win solutions

In addition, outstanding customer service leaders:

• Acknowledge and reward people’s strengths, accomplishments, and development
• Offer useful feedback and identify people’s needs for development
• Mentor, give timely coaching, and offer assignments that challenge and grow a person’s skill.
• Understand the forces that shape views and actions of clients, customers, or competitors
• Accurately read situations and organizational and external realities
• Use complex strategies like indirect influence to build consensus and support
• Listen well and seek mutual understanding
• Welcome sharing of information fully
• Foster open communication and stay receptive to bad news as well as good
• Articulate and arouse enthusiasm for a shared vision and mission
• Step forward to lead as needed, regardless of position
• Guide the performance of others while holding them accountable
• Lead by example
• Recognize the need for change and remove barriers
• Challenge the status quo to acknowledge the need for change
• Champion the change and enlist others in its pursuit
• Model the change expected of others
• Spot potential conflict, bring disagreements into the open, and help deescalate
• Encourage debate and open discussion
• Build rapport and keep others in the loop
• Make and maintain personal friendships among work associates
• Balance a focus on task with attention to relationships
• Collaborate, sharing plans, information, and resources
• Promote a friendly, cooperative climate
• Model team qualities like respect, helpfulness, and cooperation
• Draw all members into active and enthusiastic participation
• Build team identity, esprit de corps, and commitment
• Protect the group and its reputation
• Share credit

See also this article which codes the whole EC Framework according to customer service requirements: basic competencies, higher-level competencies, and competencies for customer service leaders.

Core purpose

Excerpts from Built to Last, Chapter 11, pages 224–228
Jim Collins, Jerry Porras

• Core purpose, the second component of core ideology, is the organization’s fundamental reason for being. An effective purpose reflects the importance people attach to the company’s work — it taps their idealistic motivations — rather than just describing the organization’s output or target customers.
• It captures the soul of the organization. Purpose gets at the deeper reasons for an organization's existence beyond just making money, as illustrated by a speech David Packard gave to HP people in 1960: “I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately — they make a contribution to society, a phrase that sounds trite but is fundamental … You can look around and still see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives come largely from a desire to do something else — to make a product, to give a service — generally to do something that is of value.”
• Purpose (which should last at least 100 years) should not be confused with specific goals or business strategies (which should change many times in 100 years). Whereas you might achieve a goal or complete a strategy, you cannot fulfill a purpose; it is like a guiding star on the horizon—forever pursued, but never reached. Yet while purpose itself does not change, it does inspire change. The very fact that purpose can never be fully realized means that an organization can never stop stimulating change and progress in order to live more fully to its purpose.

Examples of Core Purpose

• 3M: To solve unsolved problems innovatively
• Fannie Mae: To strengthen the social fabric by democratizing home ownership
• Mary Kay: To give unlimited opportunity to women
• Merck: To preserve and improve human life
• Nike: To experience the emotion of competition, winning, and crushing competitors
• Walt Disney: To make people happy

Merck mission

Excerpts from Built to Last, Chapter 3, Page 47
Jim Collins, Jerry Porras

In 1935 (decades before “values statements” became popular), George Merck II penned the ideals that would guide his company to greatness: “[We] are workers in industry who are genuinely inspired by the ideals of advancement of medical science, and of service to humanity.”

With these ideals as a backdrop, we’re not surprised that more than 50 years later, Merck elected to develop and give away Mectizan, a drug to cure “river blindness,” a disease that infected over a million people in the Third World with parasitic worms that caused painful blindness. Knowing that the project would not produce a large return on investment - if it produced one at all - the company nonetheless went forward. When even governments would not buy the product for their own infected people, Merck elected to give the drug away free to all who needed it. Merck also involved itself to directly reach the millions of people at risk from the disease, at its own expense.

Asked why Merck that decision, then ceo Roy Vagelos pointed out that failure to go forward with the product could have demoralized Merck scientists - scientists working for a company that explicitly viewed itself as “in the business of preserving and improving human life.” He also said: 

"When I first went to Japan fifteen years ago, I was told by Japanese business people that it was Merck that brought streptomycin to Japan after World War II, to eliminate tuberculosis, which was eating up their society. We did that. We didn’t make any money. But it’s no accident that Merck is the largest American pharmaceutical company in Japan today. The long-term consequences of [such actions] are not always clear, but somehow I think they always pay off.”

Sony's founding purpose

Excerpts from Built to Last, Chapter 3, Page 50
Jim Collins, Jerry Porras

When Masaru Ibuka started Sony among the ruins of a defeated and devastated Japan, he rented an abandoned telephone operator’s room in the hollow remnants of a bombed and burned-out old department store in downtown Tokyo and, with seven employees and $1,600 of personal savings, began work.

He codified an ideology for his newly founded company. On May 7, 1946, less than ten months after moving to Tokyo - and long before turning a positive cash flow - he created a “prospectus” for the company that included the following items:

If it were possible to establish conditions where persons could become united with a firm spirit of teamwork, and exercise to their heart’s desire their technological capacity ... then such an organization could bring untold pleasure and untold benefits … Those of like minds have naturally come together to embark on these ideals.

PURPOSES OF INCORPORATION

• To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.
• To pursue dynamic activities in technology and production for the reconstruction of Japan and the elevation of the nation’s culture.
• To apply advanced technology to the life of the general public.

MANAGEMENT GUIDELINES

• We shall eliminate any unfair profit-seeking, persistently emphasize substantial and essential work, and not merely pursue growth.
• We shall welcome technical difficulties and focus on highly sophisticated technical products that have great usefulness in society, regardless of the quantity involved.
• We shall place our main emphasis on ability, performance, and personal character, so that each individual can show the best in ability and skill.

Service ethics

Excerpts from Service ethics
Charles Watson & Pamela Johnson, in Executive Excellence

• Genuine satisfaction is achieved when one lives for something outside of oneself instead of doing what one merely enjoys, or doing things that might produce recognition and praise or a sense of self-confidence, or affection and companionship.
• Behaving only to fulfill self-centered needs truncates what a human is capable of experiencing and achieving.
• Those who make lasting contributions, as history reveals, are not the ones who seek happiness for themselves. A sense of fulfillment comes unexpectedly, through sacrifices in the service of others or in some great cause.
• A careful analysis of the happiest people shows that they have succeeded in forgetting themselves while they were all-consumed in the service of something truly worthwhile.
• The good life is achieved not by obtaining valuables for oneself but by serving others in valuable ways.
• By serving others, not ourselves, we derive lasting satisfaction.
• Working to serve others or a great cause not only produces remarkable business results, it also changes dramatically those who chose to do so.
• We can better understand why service leads to a better world and to a better life by realizing that selfless service demands a radical departure from customary attitudes, orientations, and habit patterns. It requires boldness to put oneself second to something greater first. It requires vigilance to monitor one's feelings and actions to maintain these priorities.
• Service calls the individual to subordinate himself as the central focus of life, to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to shoulder his responsibilities and carry the burdens demanded by his cause, and to realize that he steadily builds his own character.
• One indication of whether a person has forgotten himself in the pursuit of a cause is whether he views his work as a privilege, or as a form of drudgery. Those who are concerned mostly with serving and who forget themselves in the process, view their work as a privilege, and in so doing are equipped with the right attitude and mental stamina to bear the difficulties and hardships the work involves.
• Every great endeavor requires great sacrifices; nothing of significance is produced through insignificant efforts.
• Life takes on real meaning when one does meaningful things. Then no demand is too great, no work too dirty, no job unimportant.
• We owe everything to those people who spend their lives without fear, hesitation, or expectation of personal gain and comfort, working for great causes. Only through service do people achieve greatness.
• The great difficulty for anyone is to make himself into the kind of person who gives up what he thinks he owns, to become someone who boldly spends his life in the service of worthwhile ends.

Service & Society

My interest in customer service stems primarily from a quixotic belief that you can use it to make the world a better place, one customer at a time.

• We encounter customer service people far more frequently than we do our guru, priest, pastor, rabbi, or imam. Their impact on our daily lives is far more substantial.
• They can ruin your day, or turn it around.
• When they make us happy, we tend to make other people happy. When they tick us off, we drive away with screeching tires, honk at old people in the fast lane, kick the dog off the yard, and demand a divorce.

Through what psychologists like to call the "emotional contagion", customer service people can spread an epidemic of kindness. We can be weapons of mass construction.

Party pooper

If you'd ever had to fall in line at the DMV, you may have thought "even Costco has shorter lines than this", and entertained dreams of privatization.

Harvard University's Jane Fountain may wake you up. In Paradoxes of Public Sector Customer Service, she concludes that increasing customer service in government may actually lead to poorer government service.

• The use of market-based perspectives may be dangerous when these substantially recast the role of the state and the relationship between the state and its citizens.
• Service models may produce improvements, but they obscure political outcomes that render some customers much less powerful than others.
• Without political change, these "market segments"--the poor and the politically weak--will continue to be poorly served.
• The growing incursion of market metaphors into political life may further the already disturbing erosion of civic responsibility and civic engagement.

Well thanks a lot, Jolly Jane.