Thursday Thoughts:

(First published March 2015)

In my last post, I wrote about recently giving a refresher program on manners to some men in a long-term drug rehab. While we talked about a wide range of ways to use good manners, but this particular one — the subject of this blog — never got mentioned at all. Of course, I only had one hour, and there was so much else to discuss!

But the program got me thinking, and then a response from a reader on it solidified a thought I’d had about courtesy and customer service.

Have you ever noticed that in almost all articles on good customer service, the focus is only on the customer service agent? We talk endlessly about giving them great training, showing them how to solve most any problem (other than just hanging up on the customer), and words they can use to hopefully keep the conversations positive with good end results.

What’s amazing to me is that we so rarely talk about the other person in that conversation: the customer! The most-likely upset / frustrated / angry customer who has called about a problem.

I mean, really: When’s the last time any one of us called a company’s agent to say “I hope you’re having a great day!”?

I think this is a conversation worth having. Yes, we call when we’re upset; we have a problem of some sort, and we want someone to fix…