Great Service starts at the top of the org-chart.
Graham Harvey CSP
Service Leadership: Coaching service leaders and their teams to design cultures of service excellence, and to deliver standout customer experiences that delight every customer ... every time!
I recall several years ago being asked by the General Manager of a service organisation to provide customer service training for their frontline customer-facing staff. In the pre-training briefing meeting, I asked who on the senior management team would be participating in the half-day workshop. “No-one” he said, “it’s the frontline where the problem is.”
Subsequent discussion failed to convince him that the external is merely a reflection of the internal ... that the quality of service customer-facing employees deliver to their customers and guests, will never be greater than the service (the care, support, and attention) they experience on a daily basis from senior management.
“The most effective leadership I could exercise was not in what I said, no matter how compellingly, but in how I acted” – Bruce Nordstrom
“Great leaders are what they want their companies to become” – Sam Walton.
Great service starts at the top.
At Ritz-Carlton, all employees, including the CEO and all members of the Marriott International C-Suite, attend the daily ritual of ‘Line-up’ where the first 10-15 minutes of every shift, in every department, at every Hotel, is dedicated to reviewing one of Ritz-Carlton’s 12 Service Values. In other words, EVERY member of staff participates in customer service training EVERY day.
BTW, because the second of my four Values is Integrity, I respectfully declined to provide training for the service organisation mentioned at the start of this article.
Why? ... you may ask. Simply because the next-level service excellence and customer experience training that I planned to deliver, would only have created pain and frustration when participants tried to implement their new learning in a workplace environment that refused to understand or acknowledge where the real problem existed. I would have been taking their money under false pretences.
There are none so blind as they who choose not to see!
PS. In a similar vein, whenever I hear business owners and managers complaining they can’t attract and retain good staff, I know they are refusing to address where the real problem is. As the old saying goes, people join companies and leave managers.
“Reputation is the echo of your actions.” – James Clear