The 29 best things ever said about service

Share them with your teams:

1 The customer is why.
2 Good service means never having to askfor anything.
3 Bad service happens all by itself, good service has to be managed.
4 Good service can save a bad meal. A good meal cannot save bad service.
5 If someone knocked on your door tomorrow morning and said: “I want to pay for your mortgage, car payment, kids’ tuition, weekly groceries and next 10 holidays!” how would you treat them? That’s your customer.
6 Make happy those who are near and those who are far will come – Chinese proverb
7 If a customer has one genuine grievance, do two things to resolve it.
8 Customers are like spouses, if you don’t show appreciation they will go somewhere else.
9 “Product expertise can be duplicated, so any competitive advantage based on products will eventually go away. But customer expertise is competitively defendable, unique and permanent.” – Martha Rogers
10 Customers will forgive us for a higher price but they will never forgive us for lower quality.
11 Our business is run for the enjoyment and pleasure of our customers, not for the convenience of the staff or the owners.
12 A customer should never have to get out of their chair or car to do some part of our job.
13 Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself.
14 Service is our invisible product. It’s free. Heap it on.
15 A happy customer buys more.
16 The most expensive thing in a
restaurant is an empty chair.
17 Since there is always a lower price somewhere else, what people really buy is value.
18 Handle every single transaction with each and every person, no matter who that person is, as if you will have to live with them in a very small room for the rest of your life.
19 Different is not always better, but better is always different
20 Repeat business is always dependent on the weakest employee you allow on your team.
21 “There’s no magic to magic, it’s all in the details.” — Walt Disney
22 Know the difference between “service” and “hospitality”: Service fulfils a need—so does anATM— but hospitality fulfils people
23 The competition is the customer.
24 “Tomorrow, when you go to work, if it doesn’t make the customer happy, move the business forward and make you money, then don’t do it.” –Reed Hastings, chief executive, Netflix
25 If you’re not serving the customer directly, you’d better be serving someone who is.
26 You don’t build business, you build people. People build business.
27 Never get bored with the basics.
28 Leaders learn the hard way that having a bad service reputation is like a hangover. It takes a while to get rid of and makes everything else suffer.
29 “You don’t fail by making mistakes, you fail by taking too long to find out about them.” – Russ Umphenour

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Jim Sullivan is a consultant, author and speaker. Companies using his training products or programmes include McDonald’s, Starbucks, Walt Disney Company,  Panera Bread and Applebee’s. You can get his leadership enewsletter and product catalogue at www.sullivision.com