Stop the scripted customer service – be a human Entrepreneur

A friend of mine has the kind of news that the floor sells under you. The type of diagnosis that makes life in countdown and agreements. But what he remembers the most was not a doctor or a test result; It was a hospital visit, one of the many. He pulled up the curb, emotionally destroyed. It rained, and an employee-not nurse, not a doctor, not someone who was “customer-oriented” out with an umbrella and walked him to the door.

There was no clipboard, not a protocol, only a person who recognized another person in need – now that is customer service. Not because someone has submitted a ticket, not because it was in their job description, but because they noticed and acting. That kind of behavior does not come from a customer service team; It comes from a culture.

Customer service is not just a department

Customer service is not an agency or a headset. It is not your hold -music, your chatbot or you “let us know how we did it” e -mail. Those are functions. They help, but they are not what people remember.

What people remember are the small, unwritten moments, especially those who happen when things go sideways. A calm gesture; an act of ownership; A teammate who saw and stepped in to fill it. The experiences that deserve trust and build loyalty do not belong to one team. They belong to everyone. If hospitals, restaurants and airlines can build cultures where the service appears everywhere, why would your company not? Why wouldn’t mine?

Here is the thing: I have worn the uniforms. I have seen the cracks.

I led teams in the US Army. I have spent years in commercial development. I have set up and scaled a software company that serves some of the most essential professionals in the country, contractors who retain our schools, hospitals and infrastructure. I have also seen how my parents – immigrants to this country – navigate systems that often felt invisible.

I was treated like a number. I was also treated as I did – and I never forgot the difference. One truth applies in every industry and roll: a system without soul is only machines. A company without humanity is just noise.

Related: this 4-step secret is the key to exceptional customer service and it requires much more than just smiling

What you can’t follow is still important

My company is metric. We follow NPs. We follow CSAT. We care about the speed of response and time to resolution. But those are not the reasons why customers get stuck.

The moments that matter, live between the statistics. Just like the time that one of our engineers jumped into a medium print in a customer training print, just to clarify a workflow and to ensure that the team was set up for success. Or when one of our marketers heard that a new customer was not sure how it should be paid best to each other, connected to our implementation team and helped when making a simple, visual launch overview, simply to ensure that everyone was tailored before the kick -off.

No bureaucracy, no baton transfer, only ownership. Those moments don’t touch a dashboard. But they hit differently and they form how your team sees the job.

So how do you build a service culture?

Founders like to say: “We are obsessed with the customer.” But if the service lives in one team, this is not value. It is a department. If you want to be of service to a culture instead of a silo, this is what worked for us:

1. Rent people who notice the little things

We screen for it. In interviews we ask for once that someone took the initiative, not because they had to, but because they saw and acted something. If they don’t have a story, we will continue. Curiosity and consciousness are more predictive than job titles.

2. Strengthen what you cannot quantify

Four the moments that nobody follows. A quick thank you in Slack. A shoutout with all the hands. We bring to the attention of a “hero of the month”, not for touching a number, but for the appearance of the way our values expect. Repeat people what is being noticed. You just have to notice it first.

3. Remove the friction to act

It is not enough to say, “Trade as an owner.” You have to build a system that allows it. Can your engineer participate in a customer conversation? Can your designer help a prospect? Can someone put up a hand without 15 layers of approval? Culture is how people behave when nobody looks. Structure is what so consistently lets them worn in this way.

Related: Do you want a revolution of customer service? Start changing your culture

The real culture appears when it is difficult

We work with commercial contractors. These are teams under pressure, juggling with field chaos, project deadlines and customer expectations. They don’t care if we will answer in 60 seconds instead of 90. They give it that we appear when it counts. That often means doing something that is not our job. What exactly the point is.

Great companies are not built on services. They are built on service cultures. And in a world of automation, outsourcing and AI, the last real differentiator about how your team makes people feel, especially when things go wrong and no one knows who he should call. And when someone came in, not because they had to, but because they could.

At my company, BuildOps, our values are simple:

• Act as an owner
• Love our customers
• Work together to win

We don’t hang them alone on walls. We use them to hire, train, promote and serve. Because when everyone treats service as if it were his work, nobody stays in the rain. If you want to build a company that lasts, forget the scripts. Forget the playbooks. Focus on this instead:

• Rent people who notice it
• Four that cannot be followed
• Make it easy to help

You don’t need another dashboard. You need more people who wear the umbrella. Because when the storm strikes, that is what your customers will remember. And they will come back for that.

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