Service

There are GREAT REASONS you must deliver GREAT SERVICE. Great service helps to produce great employees and great employees produce great clients. 

Ultimately, all sustainable business is built upon relationships. Trust is the foundation for all relationships and high quality service is the ultimate competitive advantage to enhancing and securing the relationships you need to maintain and grow your business. Once you have established that you are trustworthy and get the commitment from the customer, you can then go to work providing exceptional and continually improving service.

Today anyone can do business with anyone, anywhere with the stroke of a keyboard or on a telephone. When doing business this way,  the impersonal compromise of the human element is a result.  When we are not "pressing the flesh" we really don't get to know people. To really know someone you must get in front of them and invest time learning from them, and generally, stuff about them.

People are still people and they deserve to be treated like the very people who are paying your bills because they are. Passionate, sincere and high-quality service is the most effective method to build lasting relationships and it is often the easiest and least costly commitment you can make.

Bad service can cut so deeply that the victim will go to great lengths to share the unpleasant experience with others and the feeling last a long, long time. The damage can be permanent because the cut of bad service is so deep, that the customer is not interested in taking another chance. They simply take their business and their money to your competition. 

Great service means that once a problem is identified, you will move quickly to acknowledge, take ownership and resolve! Great service is the BEST COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE and it is completely within your control. Look at it this way: If you don't provide the service your customer deserves, your competition can.

The Rock In Your Shoe

We have all experienced the rock in our shoe.

While walking along a small rock somehow makes its way into our shoe and works its way down to the sole of our foot under the sock. The discomfort is so small that we will often not give it enough consideration to stop what we are doing and remove the rock. Instead, we change our behavior and walk a little differently or slow down somewhat to adjust for the irritation.

Another example of this controllable event is when we are driving for a while and the farther we drive the more agitated and upset we get. We know something is really bothering us but we can't explain what, because we are not paying attention to the details. Then we realize that over thirty minutes ago we drove through a rain storm and now that we are driving in the sun, we snap that our windshield wipers are still on high!

Far too often we accept things the way they are, because we just don't want to make the changes necessary to make things better. Instead we adjust our behavior or our standards or our expectations and accept less than we should. Many times the things that need to be changed are minor and will require little effort to adjust and become more street savvy. Many times people are the source of the irritation that we accept and often they are not aware because no one cared enough, to point out the bad behavior before it became a major issue. People deserve to know and if they don't want to change, perhaps they deserve the opportunity to go and do something else, somewhere else.

Don't accept the rock in your shoe as something that just has to be. Make the decisions to make the changes and stop accepting that things cannot be different. Because, when you modify your behavior or your urgency or your direction because of the small thing that just isn't right, you started the compromise-slide and soon enough you will discover that you are compromising on boulders in your shoe all because you didn't take the time to remove the pebble.