All customer service starts at the top. It’s a cultural thing. To have great customer service you have to have respect for your customers, everyone in the company has to respect the customer not just the customer service people.

Look, it’s pretty easy to pass everything along to the customer service people (by the way when I say customer service people I also mean inside sales people because I have found that in our industry these terms are pretty much interchangeable). So for the record here, if a company wants to have great customer service everyone in the company and I mean everyone from the owner to the president to the sales manager to the plating supervisor to the maintenance person to the person in shipping and yes to the customer service person everyone has to be completely focused on the customer. Everyone has to live, eat and breathe customer service. Everyone should be staying up nights trying to figure out how to deliver the best possible customer experience on the market today, and the company leader should be personally leading that charge.

You should also remember that when it comes to the ways customers judge your treatment of them you are not only competing against other board shops but you are also competing against the best customer service companies in the world from Disney to L.L. Bean from Tiffany’s to Nordstrom’s. That’s a lot of pressure!

Yes, great customer service comes from the top and filters all the way through the organization. But please be careful. Be very careful because that sword cuts both ways. As the leader of a company you have to make sure that at no time and I mean at no time will you ever bad mouth a customer. If you get angry at a customer, if you get frustrated with a customer or if you just don’t get along with a customer, you never let than show. You never let anyone in your organization hear you bad mouth a customers. The fact is that anything that comes out of your mouth is multiplied ten-fold when it hits the troops. If you are a company president and you publicly knock a customer you are literally yelling to your people that they now have permission to knock that customer as well. You will have set that example and once that happens there is almost no turning back.

Have you ever said something like this?

My sales people are too close to their customers they need to be reminded of who they work for?

Or this:

Look I don’t care what the customer wants, this is the way we do it here, this is our policy.

Or this:

So what if we’re late, everybody is late once in a while. We’re a board shop, board shops screw up once in a while, and they are just going to have to understand that.

Man, I hope you have never said any of these things or anything close to sounding like these things. But if you have, then you better rethink your role in the organization because you are sending a terrible message to everyone who works in your company, particularly those who are working on the front lines, like your customer service and sales people.

The point here is that you can come up with all kinds of great examples, ways to deliver great customers service and you can teach them to your customer service people until you’re blue in the face, but if the rest of the organization doesn’t buy into it you are wasting your time.

True company leaders lead, they lead the charge for great customer service. They monitor what their people are saying, making sure that they are always positive when it comes to the customer. They lead discussions and brainstorming sessions to find newer and better ways to “WOW!” their customers. When there is an issue with a customer, a problem to overcome, the true leader will always take the high road and do what is best for the customer and he or she will do it loudly so that everyone in the organization gets the message and completely understand that this is a great customer service company.

We’ve been talking about the president of the company but this kind of positive customer service modeling behavior has to permeate throughout the entire management team, from Directors to General Managers to Supervisors and Leads, everyone has to bring the customer to the table, everyone has to make sure that the people who work for them completely understand that there is no skimping when it comes to respecting the customer. The customer is king and the customer is the one who pays bills; and without customers there would be no business, there would be no jobs and there would be no company. It’s as simple as that.

In short everyone in the company works in customer service, everyone in the company has to have the customer foremost in their minds at all times and everyone in the company has to ask every time there is a decision to be made, “Will this be good for the customer?” It’s only common sense.