Customer Service and The Pursuit of Happiness

from The customer service Reader


Does happiness at work matter? Most of your life is spent going to work, being at work, going from work, thinking about work, and talking about work after work. If you work in customer service, and are not happy with your job, you have the wrong job. You should find the calling that makes you happy. When you are happy at work, you’ll never have to work another day.
Most people don’t expect to find happiness, working a customer service job. But customer service, by its very nature, presents unique opportunities for the pursuit of happiness, not only for individuals, but for society as a whole.
Researchers in the field of Subjective Well-being (happiness) have found that there are certain characteristics that happy people have in common. Happy people:
Have self-control
Are grateful
Have good social relationships, supportive friends and family
Have an adequate income
Have respectable jobs, and
Have a philosophy that provides meaning to their lives.
Using this framework, can we, as providers, find happiness through customer service?
Self-control
The consistent practice of outstanding customer service behaviors requires an extraordinary amount of self-control. It starts with the realization that YOU are in control.
You choose your attitude
You choose your response
You choose to set aside your personal problems
You choose to give others a better day
When we take control, we refuse to be victims of circumstance, or of our own personal weaknesses. We take charge of our lives and of the situations that we face. This is a principal requirement of a life in service and, as it turns out, a principal requirement for a happy life.
Gratitude
"Thank you" is perhaps that the second most important customer service phrase. We use it (or ought to use it) dozens of times a day (thank you for calling, thank you for bringing that to my attention, thank-you-come-again). When we use these phrases authentically - i.e. when we mean what we say - we develop a habit of thankfulness. In Akumal III, Dr Bob Emmons reported research which showed that "people high in gratitude are more satisfied with life, have more vitality, more happiness, more optimism, hope, positive affect, lower psychological symptoms, more prosocial behaviors, and are higher on empathy".
Good social relationships
When you consistently practice customer service values and skills, such as kindness, listening, empathy, gratitude, responsibility, and persuasion, you develop habits that will stay with you for the rest of your life, and that can be applied to all other aspects of your life. You'll be able to make friends more easily, and will be better skilled at strengthening your relationships with your friends and family. They in turn will tend to reciprocate. People who are happy have strong relationships with friends and family. This is both a characteristic of happy people, and a consequence of their behavior.
Adequate income
There is a premium in the labor market for outstanding customer service providers. More important, we have the opportunity to constantly increase both our short-term and long-term income by applying our customer service skills. As Henry Ford once said, one who is “absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
Respectable jobs
This has two components. There’s the respect that you get for how you do your job, and there’s the respect you get for having that job. It’s not easy to provide outstanding customer service to every customer, on every transaction, every minute of the day. If you can do that, that’s something you can truly be proud of, and it’s certainly deserving of respect. Chances are you already stand out, and are duly rewarded.
The second component, respect for the job itself, depends less on the individual, and more on the team as a whole. When everyone in your organization or location provides outstanding service, people tend to talk about you, and you're likely to be known and respected for the service that you provide. It's a source of pride just to be part of such a team. The hard part is that it does depend on everyone. All it takes is one bad player to ruin the whole game.
A philosophy that provides meaning to their lives
The principles at the root of outstanding customer service are simple enough to say:
Our lives have more meaning when we serve others
Customer service is, first and foremost, a form of service
To serve each other and each customer is to serve humanity
As customer service providers, we touch millions of people each year. Each contact is an opportunity to make each life we touch a little better each day. And when we make people happy, they tend to pay it forward. Through the phenomenon psychologists call the “emotional contagion”, we can be carriers of an epidemic of kindness. We can be weapons of mass construction.
I'll end with some thoughts from some people who are a lot smarter than me:
Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. Martin Luther King Jr
Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service. Leo Tolstoy
The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive. Only a life lived for others is a life worth living. Albert Einstein
Every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large. Mohandas K Gandhi

Thanks to the Customer service reader: http://customerservicereader.typepad.com/
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Company Loyalty or Self-Reliance?

I pondered company loyalty and came across this letter and thought it very fitting. I am very proud of the company I work for we do lots of good things for our customers, My job is not taxing and I work with a group of fine professionals. To that end I owe more gratitude to my position than loyalty, I save loyalty to my friends, family and faith.


Loyalty isn’t a good term for describing the relationship between an employee and an employer in an industrial organization. When did your company ask you to take a loyalty oath? When did your company pledge loyalty to you? I think you’re confusing terms. Integrity, honesty, and compassion are noble attributes that you and your employer have every right to expect, but not loyalty.

My dictionary defines loyalty as “being faithful in allegiance to one’s lawful sovereign or government; faithful to a private person to whom fidelity is due; faithful to a cause, ideal or custom.” Your company or any other company is neither sovereign nor government. Nor is it a person, a cause, an ideal, or a custom.

You and I go to work each day, and we are expected to put out our best efforts and use our talents to their fullest. Perhaps we are even expected to serve above and beyond the call of duty (or at least beyond what we feel our current pay justifies!). In turn, we expect a fair wage, or at least an agreed wage. That is where loyalty begins and ends; we give our service, and the company pays us for it.

When any employee works through a whole weekend to repair a machine so the factory can open on Monday, this is not an act of loyalty to a company. When an individual or group works arduous hours to prepare a persuasive presentation to a prospect, this is not an act of loyalty to an employer. When a lawyer works nights to complete a brief, it is again not an act of loyalty to a firm. Rather, these are acts of loyalty to ourselves, to us as individuals who are making the sacrifices.

People work hard and extend themselves because they expect something in return. They expect to be paid for their efforts and eventually to receive a promotion, a bonus, or even just a pat on the back.

I would not be disloyal to my employer if I failed to do my best; I would be disloyal to myself. And if a company retained an employee in spite of mediocre performance just because he or she has 20 years' service, supposedly out of loyalty, it would actually be disloyal to other employees and the stockholders.

Remember when you and I worked with Ed What’s-His-Name, who had been with the company 10 years longer than we had and was earning ten percent more than we were? You and I wondered why we weren’t all paid the same salary since we were doing the same work. We questioned the fairness of a seniority system that resulted in Ed’s higher rate of pay. We never did resolve that question of fairness, but you and I both ended up with better jobs than Ed. So in the long run, what good did Ed’s loyalty do him?

Loyalty to or from a company isn’t something to give or expect. Loyalty is an act each person gives or shows to himself or herself. When an employee says he or she has been loyal to a company, I hear this: "I haven’t changed jobs or sought another job. I have (without being asked) devoted my time to this organization.”

"Loyal" employees want to avoid the pain in cutbacks, but was this deal in the original hiring agreement? Did the company ever promise that "X" years of service would ensure a job until retirement?

A while back, The Wall Street Journal reported that a 12-year veteran with a soft-drink company was leaving to become executive vice-president of a competing company. Was Mr. X disloyal for leaving his company for a better job? Was I disloyal to our employer when I left 10 years ago? Were you loyal because you stayed on for another 10 years? Would someone who stayed there 40 years have been twice as loyal as you, who were there 20?

If we must be loyal to our employers, then any new company must be composed of employees who were disloyal to their last employers. After all, they left that job to work for the new company.

I've had several employers, and I would like to think I gave to each above and beyond the call of duty. But I was acting out of loyalty to myself. I was striving for advancement, for rewards, and for the security that comes only from being valuable to my employer. I’ve left companies to take new jobs that offered advancement in responsibility and money—but not out of an act of disloyalty to my employer. It was an act of loyalty to myself, to my cause, to my ideals.

None of this is to say that long service shouldn’t be recognized or protected. But companies must be explicit in saying that long service will be recognized or protected, and not have it as an assumed policy—an assumption made by employees. From my vantage point, compassion and understanding usually aren’t a part of the human resources development program. (The term human, in industry, does not imply humane.)
Remember that what you owe to your employer is honesty, integrity, and hard work.


Source: http://www.winstonbrill.com/bril001/html/article_index/articles/151-200/article175_body.html
From: What Price Company Loyalty?
by Harvey Gittler

Mr. Gittler, of Oberlin, Ohio, is a retired manufacturing executive who writes and lectures on management issues.
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