Humility, simplicity, passion

Humility, simplicity and passion are concepts that may not intially seem to go together. But the more I work with great people, the more I see these three chracteristics.

Humility is essential for beginner's mind, the great opener of doors. Humility encompasses openness and implies a focus on others as much as, or evern more than, focus on the self. It also implies self-confidence and authenticity.

Simplicity makes things easy, clears obstacles, allows flow.

Passion is really love manifested in action; it's contagious, it enables us to continue, to persevere, to forget ourselves in the doing.

Daily service: Feeling right

My husband is a wonderful teacher. He gives more as a teacher than any other I've encountered, and one of his secrets is that he puts "feeling right" ahead of preparation. For him, being in the right space to teach and to be present is the most important thing.

One of the things I love about the concept of feeling right is that it's highly personal. For many teachers, being completely prepared is necessary in order to feel right. For others, it could be a question of feeling well physically, or staring the day with exercise or breakfast. It could involve some small ritual before class.

Giving service on a daily basis is also about feeling right, I think. If you feel right, it means that you're open to what happens, you have a sense of equilibrium, and you feel confident in approaching the challenges of the day. Of course, simply depending on your mood isn't going to work. What might work is some kind of practice, whether it's putting your apron on the way you like it, reviewing any news there might be, or having your favorite tea. Practice will help to set the stage for giving great service.

What if you simply don't feel right? Then the only thing is to do your best. It may be that getting started serving customers or teaching will start to change the way you feel. It may be that focusing on others will help you start to feel right. The main thing is to pay attention to yourself, to learn to care for yourself as you develop more awareness about your own sense of well being.

Zappos: A great video about building a true service culture

Service as change agent

Service is often conceptualized as a means to an end. I think this is especially true with customer service, in the sense that serving customers is a part of getting and retaining their business. Service "for its own sake" is associated more with altruism and charitable works, and may not have any definite objectives.
Between the two concepts, however, could be a way of thinking about service as a behavior intended to change something specific, but without the idea of recompense for the one serving.
For example, managers could envision their service as a way of opening possibilities and new ways of thinking for the team members. A president could use his term in office to provide new services to the country. A waiter could take each new guest as an opportunity to transmit peace and well-being through his service. It seems to me that any position involving service implies a huge opportunity to change things.
Sometimes the spirit of this kind of service alone is enough to promote change. When people feel that another is giving of him or her self without any idea of receiving, there is a subtle shift, a sense of potential, a possibility for inspiration.

Breakthrough service

Breakthrough is a nice word, but like so many other words, its impact may be compromised by overuse.

To truly break through a barrier is powerful.

Breakthrough service is characterized by a kind of insight and generosity that overcomes barriers, whatever they may be.

Breakthrough service reaches the receiver intact and alive. It admits no obstacle, it makes things simple, it conveys authentic intention and the will to give.

The people I want to serve: like me or not?

One of the difficulties in determining value for your customer, patient, student, or anyone else you want to serve is that they may not be like you. They may have different values. They may want different things. This seems obvious, but it presents a problem: what will your approach be?

One approach could be to make your offering in such a way that it filters the people you attract. Everything you do consistently reinforces your culture, your values, and the experience your customers will have. You clearly define what you're not, and this helps to deflect those who want those things. A good example of this approach would be the kind of upscale boutique, restaurant or club which basically stops undesired clients (physically or psychologically) at the door. The undesired client will generally feel undesired and make a decision to go somewhere else (of course there are exceptions!).

The advantage of this approach is that your message is strong enough to deliver good potential clients: they have clear expectations and are well-aligned with what you're offfering.

Another approach could be to appeal to a wide variety of customers or users, either because volume is part of your plan or because your mission (as a hospital, for example) demands it. In this case, you will have to discover who your users are and how to serve them, and continually update your plan to meet their needs. Obviously it will be impossible to completely satisfy a huge and diverse group of patients, but you can certainly detect their key concerns and act on them.

All of this sounds pretty simple, but I think the challenge occurs in really listening and understanding people who aren't like you. It's just really easy to think that your customers share your values, but they might not at all, or not to the extent you believe. For example: people with lower incomes are often motivated by price. It's important for them to get what they need for a price they can afford, and they may be willing to spend an entire Saturday waiting in lines and going to discounters in order to achive this. People with higher incomes tend to be motivated by perceived value, and they're willing to pay high prices for things they appreciate. At the same time, however, they may put a greater value on their time than others, and be unwilling to wait in lines or put up with slow service. If the people serving these groups have no understanding of their values, the business in question will probably fail.

So what's the solution? Either design your business to attract the customers you want, or design your business to serve the customers you need. Both strategies will require attention, training and continuous improvement based on the evolution of your service and those you're serving. Both require you to make sure that the people serving your customers are the right ones, and that they have what they need to do a good job.

Seeing things from the customer's perspective

I spend some part of every week teaching English to my colleagues at InfoJobs. They are great students and great professionals, and I feel very fortunate to work with them. I've been teaching for some time now, and yet I make mistakes all the time.
Probably the most significant continuous mistake I make is failing to look at what we're doing from the student perspective. People talk a lot about looking at things from the customer's perspective, but this isn't necessarily so easy.
Why not? It should be simple to "put yourself into the other person's shoes", right? But as a teacher of my native language, so much is second nature to me that it does require a certain amount of deconstruction to teach effectively.
It seems that the same could be said of products, services, and spaces.
What's obvious to the creators of  transactional spaces  may not help, serve, or please the customer, user or patient. When was the last time you went into a shop, hospital or government office and said "Wow!" (in a good way)? Do you generally find that spaces intended to serve you have been created with your comfort, ease, or pleasure in mind? Even virtual spaces, which would seem to offer a lot of potential for engagement without the kind of spatial and climatic boundaries "brick-and-mortar" places face, are often disappointing, if not totally frustrating.
For my students, encountering new material in class could be compared to walking into a building. How do you know which way to go? Do you feel welcome? Is what's happening clear? Is the signage helpful? Is there something to discover? Will your activity be active or passive? What landscape of emotions is evoked? What will happen if you make a mistake? Will there be enough time to find your way around? How will you feel when you leave? Will you take away any gifts or souvenirs? How will you remember your experience?
The vulnerability of students, patients, and customers is impressive, sometimes overwhelming, but may offer a real opportunity: a positive new experience paves the way for more openness towards experience in the future.

Exceptional service stories

Most people have a story about really execrable service.

Many people also have a story about exceptional service.

I imagine that most business owners would prefer to have their business featured in the second category.

When it comes to exceptional service stories, some analysis might be in order from the business point of view. For example, you could wonder whether the amazing service your customer received is part of an integrated service culture in your organization, or simply a "random act" of kindness, leadership, or good sense.

This kind of analysis is important, because while it may be easy to have a few star people on your team, the ones all your customers want to work with, it's much more difficult to inculcate a service culture supported by intelligent processes which ensure some level of consistency.

Why is consistency so important? Exceptional service stories help to illustrate why. Imagine that I rave to you about the amazing service at a restaurant in our city. Our server was so on top of things, everything was so smooth, she went out of her way and really made my celebration lunch a fabulous event. She did everything she could to make it fantastic!

You think: perfect. I have an important celebration coming up, so I'll go there. You reserve, you go, you have high expectations, and from the start you feel like you're in a completely different restaurant than the one I described. Nothing is smooth, no one seems to being taking care of you, and you're really, really disappointed.

You feel like you're in a different restaurant because you are. Without that special server (or manager, or account rep, or mail carrier), everything is different.

So, the question is, what can you learn from exceptional service stories that you can use to improve the experience of all your customers? One thing you could do would be to simply start collecting these stories and looking for potentially extendable best practices. What are the great people doing that we should make into standard practice? The concept here is to copy success.
A quick template for copying success could be:

1. Collect exceptional service stories



2. Detect spreadable best practices



3. Train your people on these practices



4. Incorporate these into your standard procedures



5. Monitor and improve!

Product or service?

One conflict or potential source of confusion in business is the product vs. service question. What are we selling?
Although there are a huge number of businesses selling services only, many of the businesses we work with every day are selling products of one kind or another. The problem is that selling the product generally requires some kind of service, and this is where a lot of businesses really fail, be they brick-and-mortar or online. Part of the problem is often that a company believes too much in the product, which can produce a kind of blindness to what the customer has to go through (survive?) in order to obtain or enjoy it. A few examples:

• Restaurants with with truly great food in which the inattention or incompetence of the server deprives you of the pleasure of your meal.


• Clunky, difficult e-commerce sites.


• Shops designed for everyone's convenience except the customer's.

I think the underlying idea in all of these cases is that the product is soooooo good that people will do what they must in order to obtain it.
I don't know about you, but I'm less and less likely to put up with bad service to obtain any product which I consider optional. Obviously we're all held hostage at one point or another by government bureaucracies, monopolies, health care providers, and internal service providers in our own organizations. Unfortunately, our agency might be quite limited in these situations. But when it comes to having lunch or buying a book or a pair of shoes, for me bad service is increasingly unacceptable. Why should I support that kind of business?
For businesspeople, it's worth asking what you're making your customers do in order to get to your product, and whether you're susceptible to another provider with better service.
And of course, there's always the human factor to take into account: that ice cream sure tastes better when it's served by someone who cares.

Is it about being nice?

Is service just something about being nice?
It's certainly true that people with a deep sense of service are usually really nice!
But from a business or organizational standpoint, simply being nice isn't enough.
Organizations need systems to help nice people do their jobs effectively. It's sad to go into a shop, restaurant, government office, etc. and see nice people struggling with cumbersome systems, or badly designed systems, or no system at all. You can tell they're trying, they're smiling through, they're doing their best, but they're swimming upstream. And if they're great at their jobs, mobile, or living in a town with more than one diner, they'll be moving on to a place that better supports their efforts.
So... If nice people can flourish in their work if they have a good system, can people who aren't so nice give good service if the system is really good?
I know my answer, but what do you think?

Who is my customer?

When something seems obvious, it might be a good time to question it.

For example, I probably think I know who my customer is, in demographic terms perhaps, or based on unit sale, or browser, or any number of features. If I tend to think in terms of similarities or differences, it can be easy to think my customer is "like me" or "not like me."

But who is my customer, really?

A habitat for happiness: Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre

One of my favorite TED talks is this one from Chip Conley. As the owner of the Joie de Vivre hotel chain, he has a lot of insight into creating meaningful experiences for guests. A key point here is that great experiences for guests or customers come from within the organization, from the real commitment and feeling that emanate from those who give service.

Why does service have a bad name?

It's certainly worth saying up front that one big reason service has a bad name, and can be a tough sell, is because it used to be (and still is) denigrated in many societies.
Part of my family comes from the American south, where for a long time it wasn't customary to see "white people" waiting tables, cleaning, caring for other people's children, or working at gas stations.
I remember my grandmother being truly scandalized and confused when I was working as a waitress in California. In her view, this kind of work was beneath me.
Her view opened my eyes. It hadn't really occurred to me that any kind of work could be beneath me. Work could be difficult, low paid, more or less to my liking; many things, but not beneath me. But looking at it through her eyes, I understood that waiting tables wasn't regarded very well by people like my grandmother. She had always worked in office jobs, what we used to call "white collar" jobs (or, believe it or not, "pink collar" jobs, the ones dominated by women); she'd never put on an apron at work.
I stopped to consider my job, and my coworkers. It was certainly true that a lot of them hadn't been to college and weren't planning to go. But they were really good at their jobs, and they taught me a lot. Most of the waitresses I worked with could remember a ton of information, carry seven or eight plates of food, multitask circles around most people I had ever met, and do it all more or less charmingly. Many of them were truly kind and willing to make an extra effort for people who needed it. And yet some huge number of people in our society were thinking that our work was low, not respectable, even as they enjoyed that timely coffee refill, that sympathetic ear.
So I'd like to pause in my story now, to ask, what do you think? When you hear or see the word service, what comes to mind? If you don't work in service, would it be "beneath you"? And if you do, have you experienced negative attitudes from those around you towards your work?

Service origins

Once a waitress, a barrista, a cafe manager, a technical services coordinator, an artist's model, a dresser, an editor, a operations manager, a scenic painter, a retail manager, a shop assistant, a receptionist, a director of studies.
Now... A teacher, a member of the People Development Support team at the leading job site in Spain.
Most of a life, so far, spent in service occupations of one kind or another.
Some people would argue that being a scenic painter or an editor is not being in service. And I suppose that's the point of original service, that any professional endeavor is inherently involved in service, or should be...