Customer Service All Around Us

As part of a writing/editing team that supports corporate sales, I can't help but marvel at the amount of customer service needed to be successful in this and many other roles. I've found that employees who value serving the people around them to the best and fullest extent possible are earmarked for favor and advancement.

Along the same lines, I boggle at the people who don't place a high emphasis on their delivery of customer service. These are the people who eventually become disenfranchised; they start calling what they do a "job" instead of a career, and start frequenting Help Wanted ads.

You could argue that these observations aren't limited to the corporate world, that the same observations apply across the board, to your interactions with merchants and even family and friends.

Think about it next time you're next in line at the grocery store, or helping your family set the table for dinner. What if your cashier simply grunts a greeting at you? What if your sister threw the spoons that you were looking for at you? What if the opposite happened, where you were greeted with a smile or your sister helped you place the spoons on the table?

Good customer service is all around us. Some people may call it etiquette, manners, being nice, society rules, etc. They're just different flavors for what I call customer service.

Good Help These Days

My dad was famous for, among other things, lamenting any half-ass tasks completed by my brother and/or me with a disappointed headshake and a rueful "It's so hard to find good help these days." He now claims that it was all in good fun. But my teen years were marked by my responses to him: Cringing (early teens), contemplating running away (mid teens), and eventually ignoring him (late teens). I'm sure there was a great deal of eye-rolling involved throughout as well.

As a full-fledged adult, especially after 10+ years in the corporate world, I've gained a better appreciation for doing things right the first time. I may be 2 or 3 decades away from actually shaking my head and saying these words out loud. But these days I often catch myself thinking "So hard to find good help these days" whenever I witness or hear of anything being done wrong, or halfway, or not at all.