Chaos or Calm? Who decides?

It all started politely enough. A slightly concerned passenger asking a ground-crew member where they can drop their luggage. The volume of the polite conversation then started to increase.?The ground crew member’s hand went up in that ‘talk to the hand’ type gesture.

“That bag drop machine is not working sir.” The passenger replies “OK I understand.” Still looking to the team member for guidance on where to go and what to do next. The hand goes up again as the crew member marches purposefully off, “that machine is not working sir.”

My mind zoomed out from watching this micro episode to the macro-situation. The departures area was chaos. The automated bag drop areas had broken down and staff were flight by flight registering luggage manually. In the face of all this, the sensible approach from passenger and team member seems simple- be calm, no one is going anywhere in a hurry. The reality of course quite different.

I continued to watch the team member who had been terse with a concerned passenger. She didn’t seem like a monster who didn’t like her job or her customers. She was actually generally quite effective. ?It just seemed her body was in a stressful pocket of the day and chose ‘fight’ over ‘flight’.

It occurred to me that high volume customer service situations are an unnatural situation. A persons very natural response when under stress may be to ‘fight’ and that person may be working in your hotel or restaurant!

So what are we doing to help our teams prepare and maintain their calm in an environment where we expect them to deal with unnatural situations that they've never been trained to deal with?

It’s not enough in customer service training to just ask our teams to ‘look at it from the guests perspective.’ Particularly if a team member doesn’t share the same experiences as their customer on a regular basis.

I don’t have all the answers but I do know that, for four or so years now, I have been practicing meditation. The more I practice, the more I use it in brief moments of day to day life. I think a real superpower of the practice is the ability to observe one thought and then let it move on. Clearing your mind for the next moment or interaction.

I wonder if leading customer service businesses might be providing meditation training for their teams on the coal face in future as best practice?

Are you a hotel, resort or customer focused business looking for an edge in your customer experience?

Contact Kate Marshall, [email protected] or Edmond Power, [email protected], 0422 362 156 to open a discussion.