Here's a paradox of customer service training and customer service leadership. On the one hand, one of the keys to giving great customer service–profitable service that builds your company–is to be sure your employees know to make it clear to customers that they take things personally. "I appreciate your business" is a powerful statement, if delivered sincerely, as is, if necessary, "I'm so sorry that happened."
So be sure your customer-facing employees...
...let customers know that their phone calls, their visits, their sales transactions matter, that they make a difference
...make it clear that they’re looking forward to repeat visits in the future–that customers will be missed during their absence.
...(when things go wrong) apologize as if they mean it (and they should, actually, mean it).
However (and here's the paradox) one of the key traits for customer-facing employees is optimism–which, in the context of customer service work, often means not taking things too personally.
Service can be draining. Setbacks are common, reversals of fortune occur—and if you’re inclined to a pessimistic view of things, you won’t be able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
In high burnout jobs, as psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman famously has demonstrated, the single most important difference between success and failure isn’t intelligence, luck, or experience. It’s whether employees have an ‘‘optimistic explanatory style’’ or a pessimistic one.
That’s because a pessimistic attitude (‘‘That customer doesn’t really want to hear from me’’) tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy (‘‘I can’t call on that customer out of the blue now—we haven’t spoken in months, and she’s probably taken her business to another company.’’)
This means, in an absolutely critical way, that you can’t (and you can’t let your employees) take things personally. Or you’ll end up hiding under the counter in the fetal position when a customer bites your head off. Which,as we all know, they are wont to do from time to time.
Part of this is hiring employees who naturally have an optimistic explanatory style. Optimism is one of my five key "WETCO" traits necessary to thrive in customer-facing work.
(Here's the whole list as a refresher:
W is for Warmth: Simple human kindness.
E is for Empathy: The ability to sense what another person is feeling.
T is for Teamwork: An inclination toward ‘‘Let’s work together to make this happen’’ and against ‘‘I’d rather do it all myself.’’
C is for Conscientiousness: Detail orientation, including an ability and willingness to follow through to completion.
O is for Optimism: The ability to bounce back and to not internalize challenges.)
Ideally you will be hiring for these traits in the employees you select for customer-facing work.
But you can't get perfectly optimistic people in all situations, even if you started with a clean, trait-selected trait of employees. So another big part of this is, as a leader, embracing and articulating positive, or at least non-negative, explanations for when things go wrong.
So all can live to fight (or at least serve) another day.
Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant and a customer experience speaker, customer service trainer, and author.
