Serve up a Recipe for Customer Satisfaction

The recipe for customer satisfaction lies in the customer service training of your employees.

360-Degree Feedback

I read a quote the other day that really stuck with me. In the book Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, authors Kevin and Jackie Freiberg make a statement about Southwest employees “serving the person behind the need”.

I love this quote and am going to start using it in our customer service training. Serving the person behind the need implies that whenever a staff member is faced with a customer issue or concern, before dealing with the issue at hand, they should first think about the person behind the need.

What are they feeling? How do they see the issue at hand?

It implies that all of us in the service business must put ourselves in our customer’s shoes before we react to any given customer situation.

A great example we use in our own business (garden centres), is when a customer comes into the store with a dead plant that they purchased just two weeks ago. We tell our team members, before jumping to conclusions about whether the plant was watered by the customer or not, first put yourself in that customer’s shoes. They purchased a plant two weeks ago, paid good money for it, and now it’s dead. Regardless if it is their fault or not, the plant that they purchased is no longer living and they are disappointed.

By putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, you can understand their feelings and their frustrations. Hopefully then you can find a solution for them so that they leave happy with you and your store. But even if ultimately for whatever reason you can’t give them what they want, you will approach the issue with more sympathy and compassion. When you serve the person behind the need and not just the need itself, that might be all that’s needed to make that customer at least feel valued and understood, and not simply brushed off.

Communicate this with your staff, time and time again. “Serve the person behind the need”, this is what they should remind themselves each and every time they service one of their customers