“Happiness is not by chance, but by choice.”

-Jim Rohn

A while ago I was talking with some people about their customer service experiences. A lady commented to me on what amazing service she received from a cashier at Target. She explained:

The customer ahead of me was grouchy and really giving the cashier a hard time. It seemed he was having a bad day and taking it out on the cashier. I felt so bad for her. Then after he was done, the cashier turned and greeted me with the nicest smile. She was warm, welcoming and friendly. She chatted with my daughters like they were her own. What really amazed me was how she refused to let her experience with the grouchy customer spill over onto me. However bad she might have felt from that, she didn’t let it affect how she treat me. I was thrilled!

Over the years many it’s been suggested many things are “better than sex”. I recall (fondly) a certain dessert called “better than sex cake” I was introduced to almost 20 years ago. And I’ve heard sky diving, mountain climbing and other extreme sports are often subjects of this comparison.

But I’ve never heard anyone suggest that offering good customer service is better than sex. (I guess we know why.)

Yet there are studies that suggest the good feeling we get from helping others is not too different from what we feel when we do highly pleasurable things.  At least, that’s how our brains feel about it.

Sometimes when our world changes dramatically, we find ourselves grasping wildly for new solutions and ideas. But if we change too much too fast, we risk getting rid of tools that can be useful to us. Or we get paralyzed with fear and wind up doing not much of anything except worrying about how bad things are getting.

Both responses can make a bad situation worse.

While it’s tempting to make massive changes during times of transition (it feels good that we’re “doing something”) a better solution is to maintain a balance.

When it seems all we hear is bad news, it can be easy for us to join in the chorus. It can seem natural to spend time worrying about how we’ll survive in these challenging times.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Every second of every day, we have a choice to behave and to think in whatever way we want. We can choose to be negative and focus on how bad things are. Or we can choose to be positive and focus on the good things going on around us.

Today my company published a new report on customer service. It’s called: “The State of Customer Service” and it offers a glimpse of what real people think about customer service these days. Surprisingly, the news is not all gloom and doom.

But it does suggest that, in general, organizations need to continue working hard to improve their service.

Last week I got a call from a hotel employee confirming the headcount for an event I was responsible for. In her voice mail, she asked me to call her back to confirm our final headcount, even though I had sent in the final number earlier that day.

On the surface this seems like a customer-focused call. But it’s not. Here’s why.

Since I had already sent her the final number earlier that day, I knew the headcount. I did not need her to reconfirm. Clearly, she was calling to confirm for her purposes, not mine. And this is fine. I would want her to make sure she has the right numbers.

Here’s where she went astray.

A while ago I heard an interview with Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at MIT. During the interview, Dan talked about an experiment which caught my attention:

“…they created tests that made it easy to cheat, then looked at what happened if they reminded people right before the test of a moral rule. (It turned out that being reminded of any moral code — the Ten Commandments, the non-existent “M.I.T. honor system” — caused cheating to plummet.)”

They were able to prevent cheating by reminding people of a specific moral code.

I surf the Internet a lot. As a writer and speaker it comes with the territory. And I don’t mind, except when I have to deal with insanely slow websites. There are a few websites I use on a regular basis that are horribly slow. I call them “coffee cup” websites because you can go get a cup of coffee between screen changes.

That drives me crazy because it wastes my time. And I know it doesn’t have to be that way. I know this because several months ago I noticed my website was behaving badly. It was slow. Very slow. So I began looking into the problem. I educated myself on possible causes and solutions. Then I made a variety of changes based on what I learned.

Yesterday while surfing the web I noticed it was very slow. So I did a little research and discovered the problem was with my service provider, Comcast.

So, the first thing I did was try to let Comcast know using their online services. I hate making phone calls to customer service of big companies because they usually take more time than doing it online.

I was amazed (but in a bad way) at how difficult it was to let Comcast know I was having service problems. I had to create a login for their website. Then I had to find the support area so I could leave a message. Then I had to find a form or some way to tell them about the problems.