About
I have this passion for serving customers, and thus, very high expectations when it comes to service interactions. Some of the Companies I have written programs for and trained in are known as industry leaders in serving customers – I have stories – legendary stories about employees doing what it takes to make customers happy.
Unfortunately I also have plenty of stories that illustrate quite the opposite. Poor service always dumbfounds me.
This site is about both good and, well, not so good experiences I have in my day to day life as a customer, and my thoughts about serving customers.
I was raised watching what I call “Hometown Service” in the small town, wood-floored hardware store my Grandpa owned. The coffee was always hot, and even on a bad day, you were polite and gracious. There was never something so pressing that you couldn’t stop what you were doing and get what Mrs. Swanson or Mr. Adrian needed, or ask them about their family or chat about the ball game.
Which leads me to wonder… Why is it SO HARD to get people to give positive service interactions? I’ve asked this question of many very powerful and influential business people in my career – one of them, Betsy Sanders, was a GM and VP of Nordstrom. She has made a post-Nordstrom career of, in part, trying to make people GET IT. Betsy coined the phrase that “Fabulous Service is ordinary people doing ordinary things, extraordinarily well.”
Think about it. That’s bang-on. Serving customers should be easy, but it’s not. If it were, your waiter or waitress would get 15-20% every time.
Service matters, because we are all customers.