Choose an Attitude for Service with Seven Key Changes
There are countless inspirational and motivational quotes from various historical figures and celebrities about the importance of attitude. This is because, compared to many things that happen to us as we go throughout life, attitude is something we can choose. This has important implications for everyday life, how we treat people, and how we interact in the relationships we have. But did you know that attitude can also make a significant difference in a customer service role as well?
Defining Attitude
To make clear what is meant when referring to choosing your attitude, let’s define attitude: this refers to “a complex mental state that determines your feelings, thoughts, and beliefs as they relate to the events of your life.”
You can think of your attitude as the lens through which you see your whole life. If that lens is fuzzy or unclear, everything you see will be out of focus and hard to comprehend. Similarly, if you’re operating with a bad attitude, everything that you encounter in your daily life will reflect back poorly as well. Every interaction will be with rude people. Every mistake that is made will be because the world is out to get you. With a poor attitude, it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of feeling sorry for yourself and angry at everyone else. A negative attitude will impact how you treat:
- Friends and family
- Colleagues
- Customers
- Strangers
- Yourself!
Your attitude can also be thought of as the posture you use as you go through life. By working on improving your attitude, you will experience benefits both at work and personally. The customers you’re interacting with will also be rewarded. In fact, customer respondents in a survey given by Zendesk ranked the friendliness of the customer service representative in the top three most important aspects of a good customer service experience. Your attitude matters and will undoubtedly be noticed by the customer.
Choose How to Respond
As you’re likely well aware of, you can’t choose what happens to you. Luckily, how you respond to the things that happen to you is within your own control. Rather than letting yourself be moved around by the events of daily life and the choices of other people, you can choose to have a positive mental attitude – otherwise known as a PMA. A PMA will easily and positively impact every interaction you have, from those with clients and colleagues to your personal relationships.
A PMA is defined as “an overall tendency to perceive the benefits and opportunities in situations” instead of focusing on potential setbacks. This is a subtle but powerful mental shift as life’s events become mechanisms for growth and development rather than barriers intending to prevent you from moving forward.
The key, however, is choosing to adopt a PMA prior to the occurrence of either something great or frustrating. It’s easy to demonstrate your PMA when things are going well. The true test of the strength of your PMA is when things aren’t going your way. While choosing to have a PMA seems like an easy enough action, actually implementing this choice is the tricky part.
An Attitude for Service
Developing an Attitude for Service is an essential part of providing high-quality customer service to your customers. Even a fantastic product or service at an impressive price is not worth having to interact with company representatives who are exhibiting a poor attitude. Treating customers badly because of a negative outlook is costly for the company as well. According to NewVoiceMedia, $62 billion is lost by companies in the United States each year because of bad customer service.
There are seven key components of adopting an Attitude for Service. These include:
- Visualizing success
- Embracing humor
- Checking in with yourself
By visualizing success for yourself, you’re feeding yourself positive inputs, which will more easily translate into positive outputs. Embracing humor allows you to confront challenging situations with an easy-going, light-hearted approach that will prevent emotion from clouding your ability to respond effectively. And, finally, checking in with yourself about your current attitude allows you to make adjustments as you confront obstacles throughout the day.
Exhibiting a PMA every day both at work and at home takes effort. The positive impacts that result from spreading around positivity and levity are worth that effort, though, and it won’t take long for you to see that in action.
To learn more about the seven keys to developing an Attitude for Service, contact a ServiceSkills representative today and request a free demo. Interested in learning more customer service skills and techniques? Check out some of our recent posts!