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Smiling is important. Eye contact matters. Patience is essential. Being warm and friendly is a must. And providing a positive emotional experience for your customers is a priority. But, these are not the greatest customer service strategies ever. Ironically the greatest of all strategies has nothing to do with customers and everything to do with employees.

The Greatest Strategy is this: Great customer service beings with being employee focused first and customer focused second. If you treat your employees well, they will treat their customers well.

Too often businesses, hospitals, restaurants and organizations focus all their energy on the customer while ignoring the very employees that serve their customers. This may work in the short run but eventually employees become tired, burned out, negative and resentful.

Just the other day I was speaking at a hospital and was told that they were doing patient satisfaction surveys as a way to improve nurse performance. “What about nurse satisfaction surveys,” I asked. “No we’re not doing that,” they said. The problem was clear. Measuring patient satisfaction will not make nurses more energized, positive and attentive. Patient satisfaction will go up when nurse satisfaction goes up.

I have found that that organizations who deliver the best service also have the best culture where employees are valued, listened to and cared for and in turn these employees value, care for and serve their customers. Great service begins with a positive culture where employees are engaged and energized at work and enjoy sharing positive, contagious energy with their customers.

Best Buy, for example, started to measure the engagement of their employees and in the process saw service and profits improve. T-Mobile dramatically improved and transformed their customer service when they improved the culture in their call centers by listening to their employees. And recently, while speaking at Mountain Air Country Club, a place that is literally on top of a mountain near Ashville, NC it was very apparent that the owners treated their employee’s like family and in turn the employees treated their guests like family. I felt the difference.

In today’s competitive marketplace customer service is one of the key ways we can distinguish ourselves from the competition. And while we certainly need to train our employees to do all the things that make for a great customer experience, let us remember the greatest of all customer service strategies: If we take care of our employees they will take care of our customers.

Note: This goes for schools and non-profits too. If we want to make a difference in the community we must energize the energizers who are the ones making a difference.

Stay Positive!

-Jon

Jon is Coming to a City Near You – Starting June 10th we’re going to 7 cities in 7 days and we’re not complaining about it.

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