It makes no difference whether you call them customers, clients, patrons, guests, or members – the bottom line for all your leadership efforts is customer satisfaction.

Ultimately, these are the people who pay your wages. Continued patronage ensures your company's success.
As a supervisor you have some contact with customers because you are a working leader, but it is the employees of your service team who handle the bulk of your customer contacts. Set the standard for your employees by your behavior towards customers.

Think Customers First!
Your perceptions mean nothing in your dealings with customers. Only the customers' perceptions count. Every complaint must be treated as legitimate and real – as it is to the customer!

Simply because you don't receive complaints, doesn't mean customers are happy. Many just go away disappointed or mad. You must constantly seek their feedback and then act on it. Only in this way will your customers know that you are genuinely interested in their patronage.

Never disparage customers. This sets a bad example for employees, creates and reinforces a "we versus they" mentality, and may be overheard by customers – in any case, it does not reflect well on you or the company.
Just as importantly, neither you nor your employees should never complain to customers about your employer, your workplace, its policies and procedures, or internal events and actions. When you do, you act unprofessionally and diminish yourself and your place of business in the eyes of the customer.

A Service Ethic
In today's society many of the conventions that marked social intercourse in the past are seen as outmoded. Yet civility, good manners, and a desire to be of service to others remain important qualities of civilized life. This is particularly so in situations where you are seeking the goodwill of others.

The need to attract and retain customers has given rise to the term "service profession" to classify those who work in jobs whose primary purpose is to serve customers. But what does it mean to be in the "service profession"?

A traditional approach would be to consider those who work in a service profession as servants. For the time they are being served, customers are temporarily one's superiors and should be deferred to as a sign of respect.

While this approach is technically correct, the word "servant" does not sit well with some. Other titles such as "associate," "server," "wait staff," "host," and "assistant" are widely used to denote service employees. Whether these titles convey the appropriate attitude required for quality service is open to debate and, ultimately, that debate is immaterial.
Service employees are people who choose to serve other people as a means of earning a living. What they are called is unimportant as long as they are not offended by it and they are imbued with a strong service ethic.

Establishing and maintaining this ethic is the shared responsibility of the company and the supervisor. The company establishes its standards of service, but it is up to the supervisor to teach employees what is expected and to hold them accountable for their performance and behavior.

Service standards are much more than just the technical aspects of delivering service, they encompass employees' attitudes and sensitivity to the needs and desires of the customer. Teaching these more abstract standards to employees is at the heart of establishing a strong service ethic.

A Service Attitude
One of my first line supervisors was a banquet manager at a large metropolitan hotel. Ben was older, had a large family, and was a proud and loving father. Despite his busy life, he always had time for his guests and his large banquet staff – all of whom he treated like family.

Though he supervised over fifty people, he not only knew us all by name, but he was aware of our individual circumstances – if we were students, where we lived, what we did in our spare time. By taking the time to know each of us as individuals, he was able to connect to us in ways few other managers could.

For over a year, I watched him deal with guests, hotel management, and a large, boisterous, and diverse staff. He made those of us who worked for him understand that service is not just a part-time pursuit – it's a way of life.
It was obvious that Ben was universally respected by all who knew him. I had seen him greet many dignitaries and celebrities by name and was even amazed to see a U.S. Senator stop by to say hello to him.

When Ben died a couple of years ago, more than three hundred people attended his funeral. He was eulogized with warmth, humor, and emotion. The clear lesson I learned from this great man was that the love he put into service was returned to him a hundred-fold.

While each person brings his or her own attitudes to the workplace, your company expects employees to be indoctrinated into a culture of absolute dedication to quality and the needs of the customer.

Your emphasis as a leader and all the training focus for your employees is on learning how to say YES to customers. If this attitude is kept foremost in mind, it will help you and your employees handle any unusual requests or difficult situations involving customers. This indoctrination is the ongoing responsibility of leaders at every level and can best be accomplished by your wholehearted support, daily reinforcement, and personal example.

Equally important, this attitude should characterize your work relationships with fellow employees – your internal customers. Everyone who works for your company is a member of a team trying to accomplish the same mission. Cheerful and complete cooperation with one another makes work easier, more meaningful, and fun. Your first thought when approached by a customer, external or internal, should be "How can I help this person; how can I be of service?"

Attitude is the major determinant of success in any endeavor. Your thoughts color everything you do. Each person has a filter through which all sense perceptions pass. Since the conscious mind can only process so much information, perceptions are screened and only those supporting your thought system, biases, and views are accepted. All others are rejected. Stated another way – since your brain interprets sensory information to support what you already believe – YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK!

If you believe yourself to be misunderstood or mistreated, you will seek every piece of evidence to support this belief. If you are optimistic and happy, you will select every perception that supports that happiness and optimism.

The process is self-reinforcing and reciprocal. If a person is a liar, he or she will assume that everyone lies and will go through life never trusting anyone. If your thoughts tend to the negative, you will see only the negative.

The implication is that you create the world you want through your thoughts. People who are upbeat and look for the good in everything know that, while they cannot control events, THEY CAN CONTROL THEIR REACTIONS TO THOSE EVENTS! Simply put, you can make whatever you want of any situation.

Attitudes are clearly infectious and you owe it to others to be as positive and cheerful as possible. One defeatist, grumbling, negative attitude can ruin the day for many others. The sad thing is that you allow the negative person to do this. When one considers the uproar in society over the danger to people's health from passive smoking, it is surprising that they aren't just as adamant about the threat to health from passive bad attitude.

So don't tolerate your employees' bad moods. Confront them; shock them back into an acceptable frame of mind. Tell them to go home if they can't be in a better mood. The requirement must be:

"Be of Good Cheer or Don't Be Here!"
As a leader you are responsible for building morale within your team. Protect your employees from people with negative attitudes and sour moods. Don't permit one employee to drag down an entire operation. Confront, counsel, and, if necessary, terminate the employee.

Creating Enthusiasm
Work is a major part of everyone's life. It should be an integral part. Most people work from necessity. They exchange labor and time for wages to support themselves, their families, and their lifestyles. Some people see this exchanged labor and time as something apart from themselves, a necessary evil to be borne with as little commitment and effort as possible. Such people are alienated from their work.

Unfortunately, too many people suffer this alienation. They view work as an unpleasant means to an end – merely a job to make money. They are disengaged from their labors. They don't realize that every moment of hating and feeling miserable about their work is a moment of hating and feeling miserable about their lives and, ultimately, themselves.

But people have a choice. They can either quit the job they hate or, if that's not possible, they can attempt to change their minds about their work. By viewing it as an integral part of their lives – not separate from living – and focusing on the quality of their time at work, people can truly restore a lost portion of their lives.

In the service profession, you can engage with your work by focusing your efforts on the comfort, satisfaction, and well-being of every customer. This focusing – concentration if you will – is very much akin to the Zen idea of total involvement; that is, one's actions and work are not separate and apart from the process of living. In the final analysis, to do anything well, including work, is to live well.

By developing enthusiasm in your employees and teaching them to look at service to the customer in a positive way, you can help them joyfully accept the challenge of making the experience of others a better one. Not only will they get the satisfaction of a job well done, but also the experience and pleasure of giving to others.

How Best to Serve Customers
While this chapter is entitled "Serving Your Customers," notice that all of the advice relates to your employees, what they must do, how they must act, and their motivation, morale, and enthusiasm.

This underscores the important point that it is your employees who provide the service. Your role as the supervisor is to "serve" your employees by being an effective leader and providing the necessary training, direction, and ongoing support so that they may do their jobs better.

Note:
Ed Rehkopf is the President of Professional Business Communications, a company providing written documentation to the hospitality industry. He is the author of Leadership on the Line, A Guide for Hospitality and Service Sector Supervisors and is currently working on a book on hospitality benchmarking. He can be reached at REHKOPF6@aol.com.