Customer Service Starts With The Positive

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I’ve been with my dad at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte the past several days.  The first day I walked in, I noticed this mat in the elevator.

It hit me that this had to be a series.

Sure enough the next day I walked in, it had changed to the one below.  The   elevators all had  these custom mats that were changed daily.

The attitude they wanted to present was to expect the best. They wanted to stand out from any other hospital. And to me they did, not from the mat but from the level of caring and service everyone exhibited. It was extraordinary. They set me up from the moment I stepped onto that elevator.

As a professional speaker, I fly United airlines a lot.  A month ago a captain got on the intercom as the door shut and said, “Good morning ladies and gentlemen.  It’s a great day to fly! We’re so glad you joined us today.”

That expectation announcement lifted our spirits. I found myself thinking, “Hey, if this guy thinks it is a good day to fly, then it must be a good day to fly” and I looked out the window.

There’s a new book out by Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.  It’s hard to get past the first chapter for me with her rant against people telling her to be positive after a breast cancer diagnosis.  To her, positive expectations are bad.

“So, what’s the alternative to a positive outlook?” She doesn’t seem to answer that question and she seems to discount all the research showing setting positive expectations really can make a difference in many areas of human interaction.

So many people are running around being “realists,” “devil’s advocates,” and “practical” that they live their lives at 50%.  Why? Because they are actually afraid of giving over to the power of being positive.

They deride the movie, The Secret or the whole positive thinking movement from Norman Vincent Peal to Zig Ziglar. I see it occasionally in my audiences with a person with their hands crossed over their chest whispering to a person next to them, “It will never work.”  And what do they get for it?

An unwelcome mat.

You want to have great customer service, you have to put your foot down that you want to make the other person’s day. That means you often have to find something to hold onto that is positive in your life, a deadline you met, a sales call you made, a great employee you rewarded.

Only from that can you genuinely set the stage for customers to be lifted up with an expectation of better things.  At Carolinas Medical Center, that’s not just a saying, it is shown every day when they carefully remove the previous day’s mat and replace it making sure their customers, clients and staff can see what they are trying to accomplish.

Isn’t that better than being a “realist?”

What do you say?

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