Tag: Customer Service

The Law Of Compensation

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success

The second Law of Stratospheric Success for the book The Go-Giver is The Law of Compensation.

“Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.”

The Go-Giver

When you have a customer facing job you get paid a certain amount of money, as you help one customer at a time. The higher up the chain you go the more money you get paid. With this comes more responsibility for serving more people, as your decisions affect more people. However, it also matters how well you serve people.

Service is not doing the bidding of others, it is giving people what they need. Great service is this and improving other people’s lives. Service with a smile brightens someone’s day. Having a conversation while serving someone makes them feel seen and heard.

When not customer facing, making big decisions through compassion and a moral compass means that people’s lives are improved and not negatively impacted. A CEO can take care of their employees. In fact I would say that this is the CEO’s primary role. If a CEO takes care of their employees then the employees will take care of the customers and the customers will be loyal and in turn take care of the business.

Do You Care Enough To Fail

Achieving Goals, Success

If you work in customer service, as many do, like many you may turn up to work and do what you are told to do and go home again. In other words you serve customers within the boundaries that you feel will avoid you getting into trouble or losing your job. It is the fear of failure that causes the service that many people provide to be average. Not amazing and not poor, just enough to earn a paycheck.

This is the fundamental problem that causes customers to complain about the service they have provided. I work in complaints for a bank and I hear, more often than not, that the Advisor did not show empathy or provide help or that they were rude. Rudeness usually comes from an attitude of that’s not my job or that I need to be quick and get you off the phone because I have to keep calls to 3 minutes and no longer, if you work in a call centre as I do.

On the other hand excellent customer service includes listening to the customer, making a connection, empathising, as well as being efficient. In other words it is a shift in attitude not in time spent on the phone with customers.

This type of customer service takes practice and will involve failing, wishing you had said something different, etc. It is failing small enough to get feedback from a Manager when needed, but not big enough to get fired. The difference is whether you care enough to try and provide excellent service, rather than doing the minimum in order to not get in trouble.