Simon Sinek argues that outstanding customer service is not just about delivering outcomes but about making people feel cared for. He illustrates this with an airline vignette showing two identical outcomes (denied seat change) that produce opposite customer feelings depending on whether the agent demonstrates empathy and effort. He then connects this to leadership: when employees feel leaders care for them, they invest more energy in serving customers; when they feel unprotected, they divert energy to self-protection, harming service.
Chapters
Human beings are pretty simple animals. We want to feel like we belong. We want to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. And we want to feel that people that we work for care about us just like we want in our relationships. We want to feel that. We want to feel seen, heard, and understood. So let me give you an example of a customer service interaction of somebody who demonstrates care versus somebody who doesn't. Let's use an airline, just for example, because this is fairly common. Let's say you go on a business trip. Your business trip gets done early, and you want to get home to your family. You look online and you see that there are seats available on the earlier flight. So you call the agent and you say, my business trip is done. I want to get home to my family. Please can I get on the earlier flight? I see that there are seats available. And the agent says, I'm sorry, I can't do that. You have the wrong class of ticket. And you say, please, please, please. I miss my family. I'd like to get home earlier. And they say, ma', am, I'm sorry, I can't help you. I told you, there's nothing I can do. The computer won't let me. You have the wrong class of ticket. There's nothing I can do. Now, your feeling about that person and about that company now plummets. You're now angry and upset. Now let's replay that exact same scene, except let's inject a little empathy and a little care. You call the agent, you say, I'm done early. I'd like to come home on the earlier flight. Can you please help me? And the agent says, okay, here's the problem. You have the wrong class a ticket. And no matter what I do, the computer won't let me let you get on the earlier flight. Let me try something. Hold on. I want to get you home to your family. Click, click, click, click, click. No, that didn't work. Or let me try something else. Hold on. Click, click, click. Okay, hold on one second. I really want to get you home to your family. Let me. Let me talk to my manager and see if there's some sort of way we can get the computer to. To allow this to happen. Hold on one second. They come back and say, I just talked to my manager. It's so frustrating. There's nothing we can do. I am so, so sorry. Now, the outcome was the same. You did not get what you wanted. But in one example, you feel like they care. And the example, you don't. And in one example, you feel badly about the company. The other example you feel good about the company. So we think that customer service is simply giving people what they want. That's not true. Good customer service is making people feel like you actually care. Now let's take that back to the office. If we feel that our leaders actually care about us we will give tremendous amount of energy to taking care of the customer. If we don't feel like our leaders care about us we spend too much time and too much energy protecting ourselves from our own leaders and that hurts the customer. So for example if we have to keep files on all the good things we've done we've done at work just in case or we have to send emails just to confirm every decision that was made just for fear that you know we might be undermined that means we're taking time and energy away from taking care of the customer to protect ourselves from our own leaders. Good leadership produces good customer service Always.
