The trick to world-class teamwork in front-line customer service is not just working together with your co-workers. It goes beyond helping them out. It is partly helping them have fun at work. Even beyond that, though, it is serving as a role model around “authentic customer service” – not just making the customer’s day, but making your day at the same time.
The way most servers get trained is all about the customer and very little, if at all, about the server. But how can you truly make the customer happy if you are not happy? Some would say that making the customer happy should make you happy. But this is way too outer-directed.
It is possible to find your own way into customer service, find the way to do it that really expresses your own unique gifts. This will, obviously, go well beyond any script, any “company way” of doing the work. It is, in fact, a path that most of us have seldom, if ever, had encouraged in us.
But it is possible. And to the extent that you have found or are finding that path, you can truly be a role model for your co-workers, can help them slip the tether of the “company way” and become so truly good at what they are doing that only the most neurotic, control-oriented manger would do anything but stand up and salute – knowing that this kind of worker can truly delight the customer.
I have held front line cs jobs – especially as a restaurant server and as a retail sales associate, where I have experienced this. I was not technically the best server - especially in the restaurant job - but I was able, at my best, to bring so much fun, so much joy to the work that I could see my colleagues start to wake up, looking at what was happening, and start to wonder if they could not have more of it for themselves.
In the retail store, in particular, it was as if other workers, cowed by some oppressive styles by management, had truly fallen asleep and then started to rub their eyes – almost in disbelief. You could see them start to wake up to the possibility that more could be possible for them in this job. It was so obvious to them that I was truly coming from self in my work with customers that they started to rankle at settling for less.
I actually got fired form this job, by one of those neurotic, control-oriented managers. I think it was not so much because of the gripes she had about how much fun I was having with customers as because she saw the other associates start to watch me and even experiment with more freedom. In fact, the incident over which she fired me was, I am convinced, not primarily upsetting to her about the liberties I took with a customer – all of which worked completely with that customer, who totally joined in the fun. More disturbing to her, I believe, was the fact that some of my co-workers joined in the play.
