Customers—Love ’Em or Lose ’Em
Customer Service as Bodhisattva Activity
What Does the Buddha Tell Us about Serving Customers?
May I be, in many ways, a support for all the living beings
throughout space, for as long as all are not yet satisfied!
—Bodhicharyavatara 3.22
THE BUDDHA TAUGHT that serving others is our true work, no matter what kind of job we may happen to have. For it is through serving others that we overcome our own natural self-centeredness. This is the true work of the whole world, for in this work we all escape dukkha together. As long as we are focused on ourselves, we continue to feel the pull of desires and attachments; but when we turn our attention to the needs of others, we find happiness, and we’re freed from our own endless wanting.
Today the Buddha would tell us that customer service people are the most important people in our organization. If the organization exists to serve the needs of clients or customers (and why else would an organization exist?), its most important members must be those who most directly serve them. This remains true whether you work for a money-making business, a nonprofit group, or a government agency. Customer service is the purest kind of right livelihood. And right livelihood is central to the Buddha’s path.
Serving others transforms your organization while it transforms the world. If you can take a cranky, unhappy customer and solve his problem, you will transform him into a loyal customer. He, in turn, will tell others about how you helped him, and they will come to you, too. And if you treat them well, they will tell still others, and the word will spread quickly, building your business for you while you just serve people’s needs.
Consider how Nordstrom has established a new paradigm for the world of retail, simply by serving superbly, consistently. Consider how Disney has transformed the world of family entertainment, with its theme parks, movies, television programming, and retail stores. Consider how Southwest Airlines has set a new standard for the world of air travel, with its unique style of delivering the basics: low-cost airfare, on-time flights, and peanuts. Everyone in those organizations has just one job: service excellence. If each business and organization took serving others as its number one job, the world would indeed be transformed—and so would their bottom lines!
What Would the Buddha Teach Customer Service People?
It is quite clear that everyone needs peace of mind. The question, then, is how to achieve it. Through anger we cannot; through kindness, through love, through compassion, we can achieve one individual’s peace of mind.
—The XIV Dalai Lama, in The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness1
THE BUDDHA KNOWS customer service is hard work. Customer service is hard because it’s so easy to let the negativity of others break down our own mood, our own mind. The Buddha would remind customer service people of the compassionate core of Buddhism and of ourselves. In customer service, our job is to give peace of mind to our customers. We must do that through kindness and compassion.
Mindful work is just ordinary work done with a wakeful mind. Nowhere is this more true than in customer service, where you are serving people, helping them solve their problems, taking care of their needs. Here, attitude is everything. You may try to take care of your customers with a mind that is bored, distracted, or resentful; but you will become unhappy, and so will they. Take care of your customers with an attitude of service. You will feel fulfilled in your work, and your customers will be satisfied, too. If you truly do this, the individual who gets peace of mind can be the customer—and can be you as well.
What if you don’t feel so great, or you yourself are having a bad day? The Buddha would say, “Act your way to a positive mind.” Try transforming your unpleasant feelings through pleasant actions. The shortest path is through service. Making your customer’s day will make yours.
What Is the Mindful Way to Handle an Angry Customer?
The insults you offer me, though I don’t insult you; the taunts you throw at me, though I don’t taunt you; the berating you give me, though I don’t berate you; all of that I do not take from you. It’s all yours, sir. It’s all yours!
—Samyutta Nikaya 7.2
THE BUDDHA UNDERSTANDS that a customer’s anger is almost never personal, even though it is directed at you and might seem personal. An angry customer is angry at the situation; you just happen to be the person getting talked to, so naturally you get the anger. In this case, the Buddha emulates the animal realm: he lets the anger roll off his back the way beads of water roll off a duck. Misplaced insults simply don’t belong to you; let them go. The customer’s anger is not yours, so you don’t have to take it and you don’t have to respond to it in kind. What a relief! Rejecting anger with a “sir” is so hard! And yet, when you make that leap, it’s so perfect, so liberating!
At the same time, the Buddha would not let the customer’s problem roll off his back. The Buddha’s life purpose was to help others, so he would immediately do whatever he could to help the customer. Buddhism is very practical on this level, emphasizing doing the work of the moment.
While the Buddha did not have customers in the sense that our businesses and organizations have them today, as head of a large institution, he did listen to complaints and respond to them. We can use his guidance to create a list of some suggestions he might make for handling an angry customer:
First, be compassionate. The customer is frustrated, angry, disappointed, and upset. Do not meet anger with anger. Meet anger with compassion. This is powerful practice for you on your own journey.
Thank the customer for bringing his problem to you. Your mission in mindful work is service, and you cannot be of service if there are no problems to fix. The customer has brought you a gift, an opportunity to help.
Listen carefully to what the customer is telling you. As you listen, sift through the words and sort out facts from feelings. You must deal with both if you want to make the customer happy again.
Take notes, if it is appropriate, explaining that you want to make sure you have the information correct so that you can help.
Emphasize what you can do, not what you cannot do. The customer has had plenty of experience with negatives; work from the positives.
Get help from others if you need it. You may need the assistance of another department, or a coworker, or your boss in order to solve the problem.
Explain and educate the customer as you continue to interact with him. You may be able to teach things that will enable him to avoid a similar problem in the future.
Commit to what you can do. Be clear about what the customer can expect and when. Do not commit to something you are uncertain that you can deliver.
Thank the customer again for the opportunity he gave you to help turn around a negative situation.
Follow up. Keep your commitments, and keep the customer informed if anything changes.
And remember, problems may be solved, but they are always replaced. They’re endless. In the final analysis, your process is your real work.
What Can We Learn from Bad Customer Service?
Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I vow to cultivate loving-kindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants, and minerals …
—The second precept as recited by the Tiep Hien Order
DESPITE THE MYRIAD of books and seminars on customer service, it seems that many individuals and organizations still don’t get it. In fact, sometimes it seems as if customer service is becoming worse, not better! Why is this so, and what would the Buddha suggest we do about it as customers and as customer servers?
The Buddha would remind us that most human beings are operating out of ignorance (along with greed and hatred—the three poisons, the three terrible mind-sets leading to all sorts of trouble). They don’t see the true nature of things, especially themselves. Their faulty perception leads them to think they are separate from everyone else and need to survive—even if it means screwing someone else. When people are in survival mode, they will use any means necessary to get what they need and want, including exploitation, prejudice, stealing, and oppression. Exactly what the second precept calls us to beware of.
Businesses are like people when it comes to survival. They’ll do the same things, and they’ll encourage employees to do them as well. Not only will they be duplicitous in their relationships with competitors, but they will even act this way with their customers! This is why we find people who lie to make a sale, warranties riddled with loopholes, business scams, shoddy merchandise, knock-offs sold as genuine, poor-quality workmanship, deceptive advertising, and so on. Survival-at-any-cost thinking comes with a terrible social price, here and all over the world. Business history is replete with examples of greed and exploitation: from the derivative-happy bankers at J.P. Morgan, to Enron and Arthur Andersen, to Ivan Boesky’s “greed is healthy,” and so on back through the years.
Only by seeing the other as the self can we escape from this cycle of abuse. So, only by seeing the customer as the company can we create a new cycle where both of them respect and please one another. To use a relevant Buddhist metaphor, we are as interconnected as the parts of a car; only when working together do the tires, the frame, the seats, the engine, the steering wheel, have meaning and function. Without that interrelation, there is no car at all. Our customers need us and we need them, just as do the parts of the car. Our response to bad customer service—and to bad business in general—should be to awaken to the vital nature of our interdependence. Giving and getting customer service are not two.
What’s the Best Way to Make Your PR Reflect Your Public Relationships?
One addresses those who wish to learn,
without wavering, imparting understanding,
opening up and not obscuring the teaching.
—Anguttara Niyaka 8.16
PUBLIC RELATIONS IS all about speech, and of course right speech is an integral part of the eightfold path. So, public relations workers should epitomize right speech. They also epitomize the organization they work for. Thus, their right speech—which is true, useful, and appropriate—is the organization’s speech. It must reflect the organization’s mission. We hardly need add that the mission must be value driven and relational.
People (not just PR people) abandon right speech when they are afraid—afraid they will look bad, afraid they will lose something they value, afraid that telling the truth might erode customer regard or market position. Like busy spiders in spiffy suits, they spin webs of stories designed to mask or obscure the truth of a situation. This means that right view—which values relationships above self—has been lost. Working to obscure the truth, right intention and right speech are already out the window, right action follows close behind, and even right livelihood is put in jeopardy. You can see that such efforts abandon nearly the whole eightfold path.
If your public relationships are to be based on trust and respect, you must begin with honesty—in your intent, your speech, and your actions. As soon as you start to spin the truth or dissemble in any way, you have violated the very trust that you say you want with your stakeholders. Don’t do it. No matter how bad things are, the cover-up is always worse than any originating problem. History has shown us time and again that organizations that step up and tell the truth, good or bad, reap the benefit of good faith and good will from their customers and everyone else they do business with. That is the basis of solid public relationships. And from our perspective, an organization is its relationships, so those relationships must be honest. Honestly, honesty really is the best policy.