Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Each and every person here in the room, you serve someone. And in order to serve someone, you need to be served by someone. We all live and work in a world of service interactions and relationships. Whether it is customer service or government service or public service or retail service or online service or roadside service, it’s all. Even in the military, they call it military service. Right. Bang! Bang! I served you.

So what is service? No, I mean, really. I mean, really. Everybody in this room is a service professional. You wouldn’t come to a Customer Engagement, Customer Loyalty Summit if you weren’t concerned about that. So then I would assume that with all the professional history and expertise in this room, you have a good definition for that word. Right?

When you’re in a company and one of you says, “Give the customer what they want.” Yeah, but then the next shift, the other supervisor says, “No, no, no. Give them what they need.” And then the next day, the manager thinks he’s Steve Jobs and he says, “No, give them what they want that they don’t yet know that one day they’re going to need.” 

What happens when somebody says, “Our job is to meet customer expectations.” But then someone else says, “No, our job is to exceed customer expectations.” Who’s right? 

Now be careful. Exceed may sound nice, but if, for example, you’re buying aircraft engine maintenance, you don’t want it to exceed. You want what they’re doing to exactly meet specifications. So we actually need, as a group of professionals here in India in 2019, to actually have a better definition of something incredibly fundamental, like, what do we mean when we say the word service? What do we mean? “Oh, make customers happy.” “Serve other people the way you want to be served.” Yeah. As if everybody in the world was like you, thank goodness they’re not. 

I wrote a better definition. Let me show it to you. Here’s the first part. Read it out loud. Ready? Go. 

“Service is taking action.” 

Does that make sense? Yeah. You got to do something for it to be called service. Service is not sitting in a box up on the shelf. So the first part again is what? Ready, go. “Service is taking action.”

Now, what is the purpose of the action? To do something that someone else will appreciate or want, need, pay for, prefer, desire, hope for, talk about. Something that somebody else will value. Okay, read it with me again. Ready? Go. 

“Service is taking action to create value for…” 

Does that definition make sense for your company? Think about it. If I ask people, what do you do? They’ll often tell me the process and the procedure and the metrics and the KPI and all of that. But what is the purpose of all of that? Is it ultimately to produce some outcome that someone else will say, “Oh, yes, I’ll pay for it” “Oh, that’s what I want.” That. One more time. Let’s read it together. And go. 

“Service is taking action to create value for someone else.” 

Does it apply to your job? Sure it does.