I only ask for good service
Why is something so simple, so common, and so very difficult to do well?

Ask yourself this same question, and try to validate it. Surely you must have been frustrated by bad service before. Service is a transaction and a commodity in business, whether you are providing or receiving it, whether it happens in the private or public sector industry, or whether it involves products and, or services. Service is like the air we breathe. It is ever present, always needed, and frequently used.

All organizations of excellence profess, and some downright and unashamedly advertise to tell all, that they provide excellent service. Many, if not the majority, fail to live up to this expectation consistently and over a substantial period of time. Is it unfair of you to demand good, if not excellent, service all the time, day-in day-out? And that every service experience must be good? Will you bear with an occasional slip-up? After all, we are all humans, and we occasionally make mistakes.

This short commentary provokes the old and battered subject of delivering good service. It takes a look, yet again, on why it is so simple, so common and so very difficult to do well, especially in companies and organizations that strive to become service organizations par excellence.

First, let us be truthful to ourselves. We are born different and our experiences that lead us to a working life are also different. Ask your staff or colleague to show great service to the people you have to serve, be they customers or people from the public, if you happen to be in a public sector organization. Leave aside your functional hierarchy and the job you are paid to do for a while.

If you can, and willingly, serve and show great service to your customers, you should lead by example and act as a role model to coach your staff and colleague. If you cannot, and unable to serve and show that great service to your customers, then it is timely to think that not all of us have the innate ability to perform the task easily. And some of your staff and colleague are of similar constructs like you, genetically. Is this an escape clause for not being able to show you can perform? Think again.

This is why, when you come across literature or articles relating to great service, it indicates that it is important to hire the right type of service leaders to do the job. It is easier to train highly motivated employees who feel good about themselves, and who love customers and interact with people most of the time. This people have a natural disposition of wanting to interact and be nice to people. Hire the smile, and that is the attitude you want, and train the skills, which are specific to the job. The former takes a long while to change for it is a mindset. The latter can be trained and retrained for reinforcement.

Second, if you are a manager dealing with customers and you still do not have the passion to work with them, then I would suggest to you to leave the job. Or you will be asked to leave, whether laterally to a position even more remotely removed from customer service, or jettisoned out of the organisation. The reality is that it will be so much more difficult for you to make it to the top without that passion.

Companies and organizations should take the bold step to terminate employees who continually under-perform and find themselves uninterested in service. Some are so unmotivated that they do not care. Studies have shown that organizations are forking out up to three times more money to this group of employees because of bad service, which in turn, results in lost business.

Some service quality experts say you should refer employees who are uninterested in service and unmotivated to care for customers to your competitors. This way the Human Resource Department will be seen to value add to the business for your organization.

Third, put your employees through training that is designed to motivate them to care for your customers and provide good and consistent service. Training provides an important platform to change attitudes and behaviours, and also to teach the skills of service. But this is not just any training. It must be designed to lift the spirit of care for the customers and getting the satisfaction of serving them. And this is not so easy.

Training, therefore, must be planned. Employees need to be trained and retrained as it is impossible to change someone’s attitudes and behaviours through a one-off training regime. Even for the easier training of skills, training and retraining has to be implemented. An airline focused on safety as a measure of excellence enforces regular training sessions for its pilots. The pilots measure their performance through both the number of hours they fly, and how well they fly their aircrafts.

Many companies and organizations still have the perception that once employees have received a one or two-day session in customer service sometime back, they would change their behaviours and attitudes. Unfortunately, this does not happen. Without periodic reinforcement, companies will not be able to sustain the desired behaviours and attitudes. Even our office machines like the photocopier and the printer need regular servicing, and we even have a servicing contract to ensure they are in good working order. We need to keep our employees in good working order, and build in a service contract for their service training. Put it another way, going without training and retraining is not an option anymore.

Lastly, use recognition to help employees feel recognized, appreciated and loved. Some of us will think making employees feel recognized and appreciated is fine, but making them feel loved is off the charts. If we work in an organization, how can we show love to our employees? Some might say working with colleagues is not like living with your family and friends. But check again that when you have employees who show that they care and love your customers, should we not show care and love to our employees? These employees strive to do well by showing care, and in turn want to be felt that we care for them. By making employees feel loved, we qualify that the recognition given should be genuine, sincere, specific and timely.

Recognition and training are both powerful forms that organizations can bring self worth and self esteem to employees. They make employees feel motivated to give good service consistently, and more often excellent service. Getting all this right is not so easy, and that is why when you ask for good service, you do not always get it.

This commentary is written by Dr Leong Sai Fan, a Director of LQ Goodman & Associates, which is a training and consultancy company in organisation development and training. You may direct comments to sfleong@lqgoodman.com.