It's Easy to Forget That the Customer Is King
Long before the terms “coaching” and “mentoring” wound their way into business circles, you, as a customer yourself, experienced various treatments in retail and service settings. Sometimes the red carpet was rolled out for you; other times you were treated with a detached indifference or worse, made to feel unwelcome, as if you were an intruder.
The businesses that rolled out the proverbial red carpet for you were the ones that put their principles in action — principles that they instilled in their employees. They accentuated and practiced good customer service. And considering that businesses live and die based on satisfying their customers, this “customer is king” mantra isn't a bad idea, nor is it revolutionary thinking.
You'd think sometimes today that granting the customer a modicum of respect is in fact revolutionary, because such respect seems to be getting scarcer with each passing day. Is there any hope of reversing this unfortunate trend? Can coaching and mentoring's latticework wend its way down into these retail and service businesses that so often get overlooked as being too dirty for so contemplative a managerial approach?
Ironically, it's in these very retail and service businesses where the greatest numbers of people can reap the benefits of coaching and mentoring.
Some coaches prefer to work with the slogan “the customer is always right even when he isn't.” This catch phrase exemplifies the great latitude that must be given to the very customers who make or break businesses every day. In business, you just can't live without them!
