We hear much about customer service these days, specifically, how to treat customers in such a way that they keep coming back to you. Customer service, we are told, if consistently done in the right way will increase the loyalty rate of your customer base; and this will lead to greater profitability because studies show that it takes six times as much money to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.

There are all sorts of seminars, workshops, classes and presentations that instruct participants how to serve customers in an outstanding, memorable manner. Youd think that with all these offerings and all the people attending them that customer service would be alive and well in this country. My experience is that true customer service is experienced less often than it should be, certainly less often than companies proclaim that its done. More often than not, I get the feeling that employees are doing me a favor by even talking to me, much less providing for my personal needs and addressing the primary reasons I even showed up in their place of business. Occasionally, I encounter a person who treats me in a genuine, warm and helpful way and this is a refreshing experience.

What I have concluded is that customer service is a process that can be taught employees can learn the steps that are necessary to meet customer requirements, demands, and needs. But customer service is also a disposition: just because you go through a process doesnt mean that the result will be customer service that leads to customer loyalty. No approach or process can force a person to truly serve others in a helpful and courteous fashion if that person is not disposed toward being helpful and courteous toward others. Such a person would merely drag the customer through a pre-determined process in such a manner that the result would not be satisfying to the customer but rather irritating and perhaps infuriating.

So customer service is both a process and a disposition. But it is more than that.

Customer service should not be done merely to give customers reasons to come back. It should not simply be an attempt to provide for the material needs and wants of those who come into your business. Its intention should not be just to demonstrate a pleasing personality or a disarming disposition. Customer service, in other words, is not just a pleasant process that you put people through with the expectation that beneficial results for both customers and the company will be assured.

Certainly, customer service is all of that, but if it was only that then it would only be a means to manipulate customers into thinking well of us and buying what we had to offer simply by performing generic and expected civil behaviors. No, customer service is more than acting nice and saying that the customer is always right, even when clearly in the wrong. Customer service is a purpose, not just a process; it is a decision, not just a disposition.

The true intention of front line employees those who deal with customers day in and day out is revealed and demonstrated by the decisions they make throughout the day regarding:

1) how they will treat customers all day long

2) how they want to feel about themselves at the end of the day

3) how they want their customers to feel about themselves and about the company at the end of each interaction with them

4) how they see the purpose of their job and the steps they will take to accomplish it throughout the day

5) how they will work together with others on the team to perform at the highest level of caring and competence for their customers

This true intention is what customers are left with when they leave the establishment. It registers in their minds and hearts as a certain kind of experience, positive, neutral or negative. The combination of decisions that are made individually by every front liner determines the effectiveness of the customer service process; and this process is the means by which the purpose of the organization is materially manifested and by which it either thrives or dies. Any training in customer service processes must involve clarifying and refining the decision-making processes that front liners use in dealing with customers and with each other.

Customer service is what everyone who is tasked with doing it decides its going to be. What you first create in your mind and heart with purposeful intention will work its way out through your behavior into your relationships and to the bottom line. Customer service? You decide!