As a mother, I often tell my girls to always consider each side of a story and to be cautious about thinking that everyone understands things as they do. This lesson could certainly be used in the service industry. In all of our businesses, internally we "talk" a language that only "we" understand. It may be acronyms, certain words that have double meanings, numbers, etc. Several of my team members can speak an entire sentence using acronyms, and I would understand, but of course, our customers would not. An acronym that we use everyday is SPT, which we call "Spit" and is a very important database/program. Telling our customers that we "will check the 'Spit' to confirm their project status" would no doubt cause confusion. 

“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool” ― C.G. Jung 

Mistakes are to be expected, but knowing how to recover an angry or frustrated customer into a loyal customer is a learned art. A Customer Focused Attitude is critical for successful service recovery. Employees need to be trained to anticipate and identify potential problems, as well as have the experience to make decisions and to deliver skillful solutions to customer problems. 

All customer problems are opportunities to win over their loyalty. This weekend I was in a large home improvement store looking for a certain product. When I went to checkout, I asked the associate who was scanning my purchases if they carried this particular product. There were two additional associates standing around as I asked my question. Two of the associates told me what isle to look on to see "if" they had the product at all. I then asked if they could look in their system and verify whether or not the store carried this item. The same two associates quickly said no, they couldn't do that, and I would need to go look down the isle. The 3rd associate interrupted them both and said that she could check the system and let me know if they had the product. She left the register, took both of the associates with her, looked up the product and came back to me and told me they did not carry what I was looking for. She apologized and thanked me for waiting. I sure hope the two associates with her learned something about customer focused service. Attention and awareness can eliminate most issues. 

A LOT!  For those of you who don't know, K.I.S.S. stands for "Keep it simple, stupid" (not calling you stupid; just don't want you to act stupid).  According to Wikipedia, the meaning of K.I.S.S. is: "The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided."  Now applying this principle to customer service makes a lot of sense, right?  Businesses often neglect to uphold customer service standards since they don't want to put in the work required to train on and maintain them.  This is where businesses go wrong- implementing good, basic customer service practices is not hard, and for many people, it comes naturally once they are given a gentle nudge to embrace these skills. 

We have all experienced the frustration of ineffective communication. There are so many reasons why this happens, and I certainly could stand to challenge and improve my own communication skills. Limited vocabulary or the inability to convey what you are thinking plays into this. Think about a person in your life that you feel is a great communicator, what do they say or do that puts them in this category for you? Conversely, think of that person that is only interested in what they can get out of the conversation. Their self-serving intentions become manipulative and exhausting. Creating the form of communication called "win-win" you must take each other's goals into account and work towards mutual understanding. Everyone benefits in win-win communication.