Customer Service

Every worker, employer and entrepreneur works in Customer Service.


It’s true. If you had no customers, you would have no employment. You might say that Customer Service is for people who purchase your product or service. That is true. But have you considered that an employer purchases your product; your work product?

We are all in service to our customer; every person on the planet is in service for some customer, but that’s another blog on another site. This blog is about serving your customer on the job. It is also about the persons who serve you.

Man is a social animal. He can survive without other people around him, but he cannot thrive. This is especially true in the economic sense. We all depend on others; people who will buy our product and people from whom we can buy products. How well we meet our customers’ needs will, to a large extent, determine how well we will thrive. So it is important to support your customers in any reasonable way that you can, especially in today’s workplace.

The job place has changed dramatically. At one time we were welcomed in as part of the family. We might work our whole professional life for one employer. Not today. Today employees change jobs on the average of every 3 to 5 years and during the course of their working years may have careers in several different fields.

Today publically traded companies are being driven more and more to think short-term by shareholders who want to see their money make money immediately.

Technology is advancing so rapidly that a new product can be obsolete before it hits the retail shelves.

Businesses are being forced to think innovatively and globally. The secure job of today is the off-shore job of tomorrow and the software program of the day after. So the employee-entrepreneur while taking care of his customers and keeping up with new thinking and technology must prepare himself for his own obsolescence.

But however much business and technology change there is one need that will remain; the need for customer service. It is one of the few skills that you can take from job to job and from career to career. The person who has the reputation of serving his customer, whether it is the public, his supervisor, management or colleagues is going to be welcome in most working environments. This is the “go to” person. The one who can get things done. The one who can point you in the right direction. The customer oriented employee-entrepreneur will have many success stories to talk about in an interview. He will have many illustrations of how he contributed to a team but was also able to work on his own. The customer service oriented employee-entrepreneur will have many examples of how he was able to overcome obstacles and improve processes.

The employee-entrepreneur is approachable. He is the one that people end up turning to when they need help and ideas. He has likeability. Likeability is one of the qualities that employer-clients are looking for in the workplace today. Because they are working leaner and there are lots of people looking for jobs today it is much more desirable to have the likeability factor than to have all the technical skills, though technical skill cannot be dismissed.

As you are looking over your accomplishments in preparation for an interview, make special note of your customer service successes. Think about the many ways that you served your customers and apply that to the job for which you are interviewing.