Customer service is not our top priority in life. At best it’s fifth. Understand this and you can understand what really motivates customer service employees.

Don’t take this into account and you run the risk of service failures.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great when customer service is a top priority for a company. Making service your number one business focus is an insanely good idea. No arguments here.

Just understand that there are more things to life.

Customer service is our fifth priority

In 1943, Psychologist Abraham Maslow first proposed a framework that ranked our basic human needs in priority order.

Physiological
Safety
Love and Belonging
Esteem
Self-actualization

According to Maslow’s theory, our focus shifts when a higher priority need is not being met. For example, we all value our physical safety, but we’d be willing to risk injury or death if our physiological need for food or water wasn’t being met. The framework, known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, has since become widely used in the management, training, human resources, and psychology fields.

Providing outstanding customer service is a form of self-actualization, the fifth priority in Maslow’s model. Service professionals typically enjoy solving problems, attending to their customers’ needs, and making people happy. They also have a difficult time being their absolute best if more important needs such as esteem aren’t being met.

I explored this topic in Chapter 10 of my book, Service Failure where I wrote about the emotional roadblocks that can get in the way of outstanding service. Here, I want to go a bit deeper with some additional examples.

Self-esteem

There are times when working in customer service can really challenge your self-esteem.

First, there are angry customers. The worst can be rude, demeaning, and insulting. Our actions would likely be different in any other situation where we encountered this sort of behavior. We’d either confront the person or try to get away from them.

In customer service, we get to do neither. The expectation is that we keep a big smile on our face while we take it all in, acknowledge that the person is right (even if they’re not), and then try to make it better.

Bosses often challenge their employees’ self-esteem too. They hand out “discipline” for poor performance while failing to recognize positive contributions. Employees are often treated like interchangeable parts where one can be discarded and easily replaced with another. Psychologists have even found evidence that it’s surprisingly easy for bosses to put their employees in awkward positions by asking them to do work they’d never do themselves.

Love and Belonging

I recently had an extraordinary experience at the end of a customer service workshop I had facilitated. Two participants approached me after the class. They nervously looked around to make sure everyone else had left the room and then one of them asked, “What do you do when your boss is the problem?”

The two proceeded to tell me about their experiences with a recent re-organization. What had once been a cohesive team was now a difficult place to work. Roles were unclear. Policies seemed to change constantly. Bosses didn’t communicate. Long-time co-workers had begun to mistrust each other.

After a few minutes of conversation, one of them let down her guard and began to cry. Her co-worker tried to comfort her with a big hug and soon found herself crying too.

Clearly, their need for love and belonging in their job wasn’t being met. This made it hard to display the confidence that’s so critical in customer service but is difficult without self-esteem. It also made it nearly impossible to give their best performance in a job where they no longer felt a sense of belonging.

You can’t expect greatness from employees when they feel a sense of hopelessness and dispair.

Solutions

The primary function of a customer service leader is to make it easy for employees to provide outstanding customer service. This includes creating a work environment where employees feel a sense of love and belonging and enjoy high levels of self-esteem.

Are you up to the task? If so, here are a few things you can do:

Ensure that leaders foster caring and supportive relationships with employees.
Give customers as little as possible to be angry about.
Never tolerate a customer who crosses the line with an employee.

That’s the big picture. It’s simple in concept but difficult in execution. You can check out some of these resources if you want some more specific ideas.

The Communicate Better Blog exemplifies taking care of priorities 3, 4, and 5 in one project. It's written by Jeremy Watkin and Jenny Dempsey, two of Phone.com's customer service leaders. They're an impressive duo that I've previously profiled.