How attitude anchors can help you stay friendly

Updated: January 14, 2024

Being friendly is a basic expectation in customer service.

That's easy on some days. You're in a good mood. You enjoy helping people and things are going well. The products or services you support work well and customers are generally happy.

Friendliness is more difficult on other days. You just don't feel friendly, warm, or upbeat. Customers are grumpy. Frustrating problems keep happening that are out of your control, and you don't have any solutions to prevent them.

Being friendly takes a lot more effort on those days. It's called emotional labor, and it can leave you feeling exhausted.

Attitude anchors can help. Keep reading to learn:

  • What is an attitude anchor?

  • When do you need to anchor your attitude?

  • How can you identify your attitude anchors?

What is an attitude anchor?

An attitude anchor is something that helps you anchor your attitude in a positive place. It can help you feel better when you’re down and become more resilient when you encounter something that causes a bad mood.

Let's try it right now.

  1. Think of something really positive that makes you happy.

  2. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine that thing.

  3. Focus on only that for just a few seconds.

How do you feel now?

Here's what I'm imagining:

This is my dog, Dublin. She’s a sweet, playful dog and we have a lot of fun together.

When I'm working from home, I take a quick play break with Dublin whenever I need an attitude adjustment. We also go for a walk every afternoon, which gives me something paws-itive to look forward to every day.

(I'm 100% not sorry about the pun. You're smiling now, aren't you?)


When do you need an attitude anchor?

An attitude anchor is a useful way to either restore or maintain a great attitude. It's especially helpful when you find yourself in a bad mood, yet you know you're expected to be warm and friendly with customers.

What are some things that can put you in a bad mood? Here are a few common examples:

  • Negative customers

  • Difficult coworkers

  • Frustrating problems

  • Feeling tired or ill

  • Demanding bosses

An attitude anchor can help you stay positive when those things try to drag you down. There are two types of attitude anchors:

  • Repair anchors help you fix a bad attitude.

  • Maintenance anchors help you maintain a positive attitude.

Let’s try one right now. This short video will guide you through a quick customer service reset.

How can you identify your attitude anchors?

Attitude anchors are personal, so your anchors might be different than mine. Grab a sheet of paper or open a new document on your computer and let's create your list.

  1. Create two columns on the page

  2. Label one column "Maintenance Anchors"

  3. Label the second column "Repair Anchors"

Start with your maintenance anchors. Make a list of things that help you maintain a positive attitude. Think of things in your life that have a lasting, positive impact on your day.

Here are some of my examples:

  • Hiking

  • Getting enough sleep

  • Spending time with friends or family

  • Playing pickle ball (yeah, I caught the bug)

  • Enjoying a nice meal with my wife

Every list is personal, so only add things that make you happy. For example, you shouldn't add hiking to your list if that's not something you enjoy.

Next, make a list of things that can repair your attitude if you find yourself in a bad mood. Here are a few of my examples:

  • Going for a short walk

  • Listening to music

  • Talking to a friend

  • Getting a snack or a cup of coffee

  • Playing with my dog

Again, this list is personal, so only add things that work for you.


Additional Resources

Share this exercise with your team. It’s one of 10 customer service training activities in my free training guide. The Attitude Anchor exercise is on page 12.

You can also learn more about attitude anchors from this short video.

Why you need to take responsibility for your customer service

Who is to blame for poor customer service?

You can probably make a list of things that make it difficult to keep your customers happy and coming back again and again:

  • Defective products anger customers and make service a chore.

  • Bosses often fail to adequately communicate, train, or coach.

  • Unfriendly policies get in the way.

Yet, unless you have a giant ego, you need to take some responsibility, too. You were hired to do a job that helps your company. It's not always easy to do great work, but you can often do more than you think.

Here's how you can overcome obstacles and take more ownership of your work.

Why should you listen to me?

It's easy to find people like me giving advice. What makes me any different, and why should you listen to me?

Great questions. I'll give you two reasons.

First, I've trained thousands of customer service employees. I've seen first-hand how grit and determination can help employees stand out and provide amazing customer service.

Second, I've personally experienced what I'm about to share.

At my last corporate job, I had seven bosses in four years. At the end of those four years, every person who worked in my department when I started was gone. They had quit, were laid off, got re-assigned, or were fired.

Except for me. I got promoted, gained more responsibility, and earned the trust of my bosses to work autonomously.

How did this happen?

My coworkers made the same mistake with each new boss. They tried to tell the boss how things were done, and expected the boss to conform to their habits and preferences. This caused the new boss to view them as actively disengaged employees.

I took a different approach.

With each new boss, I took the time to understand their priorities and then made sure I helped them succeed. Rather than telling my boss how things were done, I became an asset to help my boss achieve their agenda.



How can you take responsibility for your service?

It's self-empowering to take responsibility for the customer service you provide. Yes, we all face obstacles. But you can be the person who overcomes them and sets a positive example for everyone else.



Step 1: What's the vision?

Start by asking your boss for the customer service vision. This is a shared definition of outstanding customer service that gets everyone on the same page.

What if there isn't a vision?

You can share this resource page that contains an overview along with my step-by-step guide for creating one.

Another option is to create your personal vision by taking the Thank You Letter Challenge. This exercise will help you visualize the type of service you'd like to provide to your customers.



Step 2: Expand your influence

We all face obstacles that make it difficult to provide outstanding customer service. This activity can help you identify more solutions that are within your control.

One customer service team felt victimized by long hold times. Customers were already frustrated by issues with the company's latest software program, and the long wait only made that frustration worse. Unfortunately, customers took out their frustrations on the customer service team.

The team’s outlook changed when they completed the Expand Your Influence exercise. Within days, they were able to cut the average wait time by 50 percent. Software issues still existed, but the team took responsibility for making things better.

Here's a short video that explains how you can do the exercise.

Step 3: Become a customer advocate

Many issues go unresolved because employees just accept them. Nobody tries to solve the issue or shares the problem with someone who can.

You can change that by becoming a customer advocate.

This means proactively trying to solve issues that negatively impact your customers. When you aren't able to solve issues on your own, try to enlist your coworkers, your boss, and even people from other departments.

One activity that can help is a promise audit.

Conclusion

There's no question that customer service can be difficult. While there are many factors that make it more difficult than it needs to be, you aren't powerless.

It's up to you to take responsibility for making things better.

One thing you can do right now is subscribe to the free Customer Service Tip of the Week email. It's one tip, shared once per week via email.

Here's how it works:

  1. You'll get a new tip each Monday.

  2. Read the tip and think about how to apply it.

  3. Practice the tip while serving customers.

One more resource is my book, Getting Service Right. It shares hidden and counterintuitive obstacles that make it hard to serve. The book also contains proven solutions for each challenge.

Three ways to predict and avoid service failures

Imagine you had a customer service crystal ball.

This crystal ball could magically predict service failures. It would give you just enough time to swoop into action and avoid disappointing customers.

While I don't have a crystal ball, I can share three proven techniques that do the same trick. Each of these techniques can help you predict when something will go wrong and give you just enough time to prevent it.

Isn't that what superheroes do? Yep, you're about to become a superhero.

Tip #1: Learn from experience

Make a list of the top reasons that customers get disappointed. Think about your experience with each item on the list. Based on your experience, when could you have known each thing was going to happen?

My car was scheduled to get detailed first thing on Monday morning. Paul Beard, the owner of Apple Polishing Systems, gave me a call on Sunday afternoon. There was rain in the forecast for Monday, and Paul wanted to give me the option of rescheduling the service.

Paul knew from experience that rain immediately took away the shine of a freshly detailed car. So he made a habit of checking the weather forecast and alerting customers when it was going to rain. This helped avoid a lot of disappointments!

What service failures can your experience help predict?

Tip #2: Follow the customer journey

Put yourself in your customers' shoes and follow their journey. Understanding the customer perspective can give you insight into exactly when and how things go wrong.

A textile rental company provided table cloths and napkins to restaurants and hotels. One common service failure occurred when clients made last-minute requests. A restaurant might ask for tablecloths and napkins in a specific color for a special event, but it wasn't a color the rental company normally carried.

Clients would be disappointed when the company couldn’t provide the requested color.

A closer look at the customer journey revealed an opportunity to avoid these service failures. Restaurants and hotels often book special events with their clients well in advance, and the color of the tablecloths and napkins is frequently specified in the event contract.

Those details aren't typically shared with operations until the last minute. It was operations that made the last-minute requests to the linen company.

Service failures could be predicted and avoided by talking to sales. A regular check-in with each restaurant or hotel's sales staff could generate a list of upcoming events and any specialty linens required, including colors and quantities. In most cases, the linen company would have plenty of time to prepare.

What service failures can you predict by following your customers' journey?

Tip #3: Monitor the customer experience

Track customer experience data in real-time to identify potential service failures and solve them before your customers are even aware of the problem.

TriMet is the public transportation system operator in Portland, Oregon. It has a command center that monitors its entire network in real time. The command center is staffed 24 hours per day with employees who keep an eye on the system's buses, light rail lines, and trains to ensure they're running on time and to detect problems as quickly as they happen.

I profiled TriMet in my book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience. Here's an excerpt:

Employees in the Operations Command Center spring into action when an issue is detected and there's a danger that a bus or train might be delayed. They share alerts about accidents, construction, traffic congestion, and other problems. Command center employees work with bus and train operations to coordinate a solution to keep passengers moving while providing updated information on the status.

I was once traveling by light rail to the airport so I could catch a flight. An unexpected mechanical issue prevented the train from leaving a stop. Fortunately, TriMet was closely monitoring the situation and quickly dispatched a fleet of buses to move passengers to the next station where we could finish our journey on another train. Miraculously, our total delay was only 30 minutes.

How can you monitor your customer experience to identify problems before they become service failures?

Conclusion

All of these tips require a customer-focused mindset. This means looking beyond your tasks to understand what your customers are trying to accomplish. It’s your job to help them succeed.

Try to be proactive about identifying and solving issues and you'll avoid many service failures.

My top six lessons learned from serving customers

Where did you learn your customer service skills?

There's a good chance many came from experience. You might even remember specific customer interactions that taught valuable lessons.

Sure, you might have taken a class. Perhaps you had a good boss or mentor. Yet those lessons often didn't sink in until you tried them out with a customer.

That's my story.

Many of my customer service skills can be traced directly to customer interactions. Here are six of my favorites, starting with the first customer I ever served.

Lesson #1: Know your product

My first customer service encounter ended in service failure.

I was 16 years old and had just started working at a retail clothing store. It was 15 minutes into my first day when the person training me went on break, leaving me by myself in the men's department.

A customer approached and asked if we carried a particular product. I had no idea since I hadn’t yet been trained. Nervous and inexperienced, I struggled to respond and the customer stormed out of the store.

It was a terrible feeling.

I vowed never to let it happen again and immediately tried to learn everything I could about our products. Just two months later, my product knowledge was improved so much that I was asked to help train a new employee.

That first experience was the motivation for my career in customer service training. Here's the rest of my first customer story.

Lesson #2: Care about the questions you ask

Just a few days into my first job, I developed the habit of approaching every customer and asking, "How are you doing?" Every customer reflexively answered "Fine," until one customer changed the script.

"I'm terrible!"

All I could muster in response was stunned silence. Before I could gather myself, she added, "Well, you asked!"

I realized I hadn’t cared about the answer. It made me wonder how many other times I might have missed something important when I asked a routine question without caring about the customer’s response.

The experience taught me to care about the questions I asked.

Just a few days later, another customer came into the store. I greeted her with, “How are you?” and she admitted she was having a bad day. This time I was prepared, and I was able to help her leave the store feeling better than when she arrived.

Lesson #3: Be a customer advocate

One of my favorite customer service lessons came from a customer who said to me, "Sometimes you have to bend a few rules to make it happen."

That was in response to me saying, "I'm just following the rules."

I was an account manager for a uniform company. The customer wanted to order some items embroidered with his company's logo, but he wasn't happy about the two-week lead time I had quoted.

My response reflected my inexperience. Just recently, my boss had chided the department for not following proper procedures and I was anxious to avoid getting in trouble. That influenced the way I responded to the customer's request for a faster delivery.

His comment stopped me in my tracks. It made me realize I didn't add any value to the relationship if I couldn't help my customer achieve his goals. I needed to be the customer's advocate.

It took extra work and a lot of creativity, but I found a way to get the customer's order out in a week instead of two. My customer was pleased and I managed to avoid breaking any rules that would have displeased my boss.

Lesson #4: Apologize deeply

"You shouldn't have to experience this."

The words blurted out of my mouth. A customer had called, upset about receiving the wrong item. I saw past their anger and empathized with the inconvenience it was causing them. Frankly, I was embarrassed it had happened.

"I'm really sorry about the mistake. We need to do better. I'm going to make sure we send you the correct item."

Something amazing happened. The customer instantly went from red to green. Their frustration evaporated and suddenly they were trying to comfort me!

"It's okay," the customer said. "These things happen. I really appreciate your help."

I had just discovered the magic of a real, heartfelt apology. It turned out it wasn't a one-time fluke. The technique worked again and again. Customers calmed down and became more cooperative nearly every time I gave a heartfelt apology.

Would you like to know the secret? Here's a short guide to making better apologies.

Lesson #5: Don't trust the system

"Did you even look at it?"

The customer had previously ordered a very expensive item that had arrived damaged. The initial call came to me, the customer service manager at a catalogue company that sold antiques and collectibles from Eastern Europe.

I promised to send him a replacement, but the replacement arrived damaged, too. His words burned me with embarrassment because I had trusted our system and hadn't checked his order.

My mistake was assuming it was a one-off error and not checking to find the source of the problem. If I had, I would have discovered our entire inventory was damaged.

From that day forward, I never assumed that a problem was a one-off occurrence. I dug into the root causes until I could find the source and be assured it wouldn't happen again.

I've lost count of how many service failures that saved.

Lesson #6: You matter

It was going to be my last day. I was working as a contract trainer, facilitating onsite workshops for clients on behalf of the company that hired me.

I was feeling frustrated and unappreciated as I set up the training room for what I expected to be my last class. My plan was to give the client a great workshop and then tell the contractor that I was done.

The contractor wasn't great. Its training materials were poor and their client service was rotten. This put me in an awkward position as their representative, since I was the one serving upset clients. I did the best I could with the limited materials and was careful to avoid disparaging the contractor.

Just before my class started, one of the client's leaders pulled me aside. She told me that she was very unhappy with the contractor, but appreciated all of my effort to consistently deliver great workshops.

Then she handed me a thank you card and a gift certificate to a local restaurant.

My spirits suddenly soared! I hadn't realized that my extra effort was noticed by the client. Now I realized that it really did matter.

That experience inspired one of my favorite customer service training exercises called the Thank You Letter Challenge. It works by imagining a thank you letter you'd hope to receive from a customer and then trying to receive a real version.

Conclusion

Customers can teach you many valuable lessons about service, if you're open to learning them. What lessons have customers taught you?

How to hold customer service employees accountable

Accountability is difficult.

Some managers want to avoid a confrontation. Others struggle with timing in a fast-paced environment. For a few managers, accountability discussions feel like the first step towards inevitably losing an employee.

Have you tried replacing someone right now? It's hard.

A LinkedIn post asked managers to share what they find most difficult about holding customer service employees accountable. It was a fascinating discussion.

One thing the discussion revealed was that many managers start thinking about accountability way too late. Here's a proven process that starts much sooner, and is more comfortable for both managers and employees.

What is employee accountability?

Accountability is not exclusively for underperforming employees, and it's not primarily about employee discipline. Holding an employee accountable means making them responsible for their work.

Here's how the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines accountability:

an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions

Using this definition, accountability goes hand-in-hand with what good employees want. They want to be entrusted with responsibility and given the opportunity to take ownership of their work.

What are the four steps to accountability?

There are four major steps to holding employees accountable for their work. Following these steps carefully can help avoid many of the uncomfortable aspects of accountability, such as issuing formal warnings.

Step 1: Set expectations

Employees need to understand exactly what you want them to do if they are going to take responsibility for their actions.

Check your ability to set clear expectations by answering three questions:

  1. Are your expectations clearly defined?

  2. Do employees fully understand the expectations?

  3. Do employees agree to the expectations?

It's not enough to tell employees to do something. Two-way communication with your team is required to know if employees understand and agree to fulfill expectations.

Step 2: Train and coach

Helping employees perform their jobs well is one of your primary responsibilities as a manager. Training, feedback, and coaching is often required to help employees develop the skills to do their job. They also need the tools, equipment, resources, and best practices necessary to do good work.

Step 3: Improve performance

There are times when employees will struggle to get the job done, meet quality standards, or otherwise do great work. It's important to get to the root cause of these performance problems so they can be solved.

Poor performance is often unintentional. In many cases, employees want to do good work, but something is getting in the way. A collaborative discussion with an underperforming employee can often reveal an unseen opportunity to quickly improve.

You can use my quick fix checklist to guide these discussions.

If you have access to LinkedIn Learning, you can view an entire course on solving common performance problems that plague customer service employees.

Step 4: Create consequences

Managers who use steps 1-3 to hold employees accountable will rarely need to resort to written warnings, performance improvement plans, or even firing employees.

However, there are times when managers must create consequences for poor performance or bad behavior. Here are three examples:

Lack of ability. Some employees can't do the job. Perhaps it was a hiring mistake or there's some other reason they simply aren't able to do good work. Try to move these employees to a role that better suits their talents if you can. Otherwise, you'll have to let them go.

Lack of responsibility. A few employees don't want to do the job. These employees will sometimes improve if they understand there are real consequences to repeated poor performance.

Toxic behavior. This includes harassment, fraud, or other egregious violations of company policy. I recommend firing those employees before they infect others.


How do you create a culture of accountability?

Accountability starts at the top. As a manager, it's up to you to set the tone and be a role model for your team.

Make sure employees understand their responsibilities and are able to do their jobs effectively. Observe employee performance and have frequent check-ins so employees know you are there to support them.

Don't let issues slide, especially big ones. Your approach doesn't have to be mean—you can usually get better results by working with employees to solve problems. But it should be crystal clear that poor performance won't be ignored.

Accountability becomes contagious once it's a habit.

Employees on high-performing teams encourage each other, support each other, and help each other do better. Many are surprisingly willing to resolve problems amongst themselves, which ultimately makes your job easier.

Conclusion

Holding your employees accountable means helping them do great work. You can help them achieve their full potential, and do great work beyond what even they felt possible.

How service culture is built on everyday hero moments

The original Shake Shack location is in New York City's Madison Square Park. The first time I visited, Al Roker was there.

Roker was handing out samples of his new Roker Burger. It was a special burger he created with Shake Shack to raise money for No Kid Hungry, a nonprofit dedicated to ending childhood hunger.

A Today Show crew was there to film the segment.

Shake Shack's mission is to Stand for Something Good. Working with a celebrity to create a special burger and get national news coverage to raise money for a nonprofit certainly aligned with that mission.

That's one example of the Shake Shack service culture, but it's not the example.

Al Roker doesn't show up to hand out hamburgers every day. You probably don't have opportunities for grand, heroic moments every day at your company, either.

Employees need examples of routine, everyday behaviors to follow.

What are everyday hero moments?

My fellow author and customer service keynote speaker, Adam Toporek, defines a customer hero as "someone who is there when you need them."

Toporek used this definition in his terrific book, Be Your Customer's Hero. We talked more about the meaning in this interview.

I experienced an everyday hero moment at Shake Shack in downtown Los Angeles.

My wife, Sally, and I wanted a quick bite after a long day. We were tired and needed a boost. The friendly, enthusiastic cashier picked us up with his infectious enthusiasm and suddenly we were smiling again.

I joked with him about the sheer volume of Shake Shack merchandise I saw him and his coworkers wearing. "I spend way too much money on merch," the cashier admitted. "But I just love it here."

Al Roker didn't show up that day, but that cashier sure did. He was a hero in that moment.

Why are grand gestures dangerous?

Waiting for a big moment can be a trap for employees. It causes them to miss smaller, everyday opportunities to align their actions with the service culture.

One client's leadership team got stuck on grand gestures.

I had delivered a keynote presentation on building a customer-focused culture. It was based on my book, The Service Culture Handbook.

Afterwards, the team brainstormed service culture stories and everyone kept going back to one moment. An employee had lost their home in a tornado, and employees banded together to raise money and find a place for him and his family to stay.

It was a terrific example, but employees don't lose their homes every day.

Employees needed more frequent examples to follow. It took some prodding, but the team eventually came up with some great stories that illustrate more common scenarios where the service culture guides them to be a hero to customers or employees.

What are your customer service hero moments?

You can find examples of customer service hero moments in many places if you look carefully.

Think about your most common interactions. Imagine how you can help your customers or make their lives better in those moments. That’s a great time to be a hero.

I travel a lot. My preferred airline is Alaska Airlines because the flight crews invariably make me feel welcome. An Alaska flight goes smoother and I arrive more refreshed than I do when I fly on other airlines.

There are some occasional over-the-top moments. A flight attendant expertly defused an angry and unreasonable passenger and prevented a mid-air scene.

But those moments are rare. Most flights feature everyday hero moments where flight attendants cheerfully take care of passengers and make the trip more comfortable. As a passenger, those flight attendants are my heroes!

Conclusion

Being a hero doesn’t require over-the-top gestures. You can be a hero just by being there when your customers need you.

These resources can help you build your skills:

  1. Free weekly tips: Customer Service Tip of the Week

  2. Book: Getting Service Right

  3. Training Course: Customer Service Foundations

Is your giant ego crushing your customer service?

"Who was it?! Who's making us look bad?!"

The employee was furious at her coworkers, and she let everyone in the customer service training class know it.

I was facilitating the class. The night before, I had completed a mystery shop on five random employees at the client's request. The class was shocked when I revealed the dismal results. Nobody passed.

One employee failed to meet a single service standard. They completely ignored me as they rang up my transaction because they were too busy talking to a coworker.

The employee in class wouldn't relent. She was furious at this unknown coworker for failing the mystery shop and insisted I tell everyone who it was.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was her. She was the employee who had failed to meet a single service standard. If anyone was making the team look bad, she was the one doing it.

Her giant ego was crushing customer service.

Sadly, this is a common problem. Inflated egos often get in the way of our ability to serve others. Here are three signs that your giant ego could be crushing customer service, too.

Do you feel superior to customers?

Customer service can get derailed when one party feels superior to the other.

Employees bristle at self-important customers who insist that the customer is always right. That outdated viewpoint isn't even the original quote!

Yet some employees treat their customers with disdain. Just this past week, I've observed employees:

  • Yell at customers for being confused.

  • Look down at customers for needing help.

  • Talk to customers in a patronizing manner.

The angry employee in my class felt superior. She felt superior to her customers when she served me without ever interrupting her conversation with a coworker. Now, she felt superior to her coworkers when she angrily demanded the "culprit" reveal themselves.

I realized I had been feeling a little superior, too.

My client had asked me to do the mystery shops before my class, and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. My ego convinced me that it would be helpful to secretly evaluate employees before the class so they realized they had something to learn. (My client suspected the results wouldn’t go well.)

Now I realized that the mystery shops had changed the usual training dynamic. As a trainer, it's my job to help people grow. Those mystery shops positioned me as someone who was there to judge the employees.

Are you overconfident in your abilities?

It feels good to be an expert in your craft. That feeling is often well-deserved, but customer service employees can make mistakes when they're overconfident.

One example is the tragic death of Pebbles, an emotional support hamster whose untimely demise was set in motion by an overconfident employee who gave the wrong answer to a customer's question.

The employee in my class was clearly overconfident.

She couldn't imagine it would be her who made the mistake. The employee felt her service was perfection and it must have been someone else who was making the team look bad.

In retrospect, I realize I was overconfident, too.

Why had I agreed to my client's request without first thinking through the ramifications? How could I possibly not have foreseen this ugly situation that was now playing out in my class, where employees felt wounded and angry?

A giant ego can cloud your brain.

Are you stubborn?

Stubborn employees don't want to admit their mistakes. They look for ways to shift blame and often victimize customers or even their coworkers in the process.

How many times has an employee said one of these things to you?

  • That's not my job!

  • Who told you that?

  • They never tell us what's going on.

All of these are examples of deflecting ownership.

The angry employee in my class was stubborn. She wouldn't relent, even after I refused to point out who had failed the mystery shops and reiterated the goal was growth.

Here's where I finally put my own ego in check.

I now understood that the training participants saw the mystery shops as a gotcha. It breached trust and hurt learning. The angry employee's outburst didn't help.

That was the last time I did a mystery shop before facilitating a training class.

From that point forward, I switched to employee observations where employees knew in advance I was coming. I always told employees that I was observing them and why.

The big surprise?

Employees didn't conceal any problems or bad behavior. I still saw plenty of cringe-worthy service encounters. Yet I also gained valuable perspective on why employees acted the way they did.

Best of all, I built trust that made my classes much better.

Conclusion

We all have an ego. The trick is to know when your ego is getting in the way and put it in check before Carly Simon sings a customer service song about you.

One exercise that can help you put your ego in check is the Thank You Letter challenge. It's a powerful way of visualizing yourself helping someone else.

Here's how it works:

  1. Write a thank you letter that you'd hope to receive from a customer.

  2. Read the letter every day before starting work for three weeks.

  3. Try to receive that same feedback from a real customer.

You can see more examples and even get free reminders to complete your own challenge.

Reduce average handle time with this one simple trick

Average handle time, or AHT, is an important metric in contact centers.

It measures the average length of a call. Many contact center leaders track AHT closely because shaving even a few seconds off the average call could allow the contact center to handle more volume without adding staff.

A Customer Service Tip of the Week subscriber recently wrote to ask my advice on reducing AHT in his contact center. I shared one simple trick that can produce immediate results.

It's a trick that I discovered more than 20 years ago while running experiments on AHT reduction. The results initially surprised me, but the more I looked at them, the more it all made sense.

The AHT Experiment

We started by gathering a sample of 20 contact center agents. The agents represented multiple shifts (we operated 24/7) and multiple performance levels.

For two weeks, the agents participated in a series of experiments to see if we could find a way to reduce AHT. One of those experiments revealed an unexpected solution.

Agents were asked to forget about AHT entirely. Instead, agents were asked to focus on the needs of each caller, one caller at a time. This meant that some callers needed extra assistance, and that was okay. Other callers were in a hurry, so it was okay to speed things up.

Two things happened at the end of the experiment

  1. Variability increased. The length of individual calls varied more widely than before.

  2. AHT decreased. The average length of calls went down.

One agent, Bev, surprised me the most. She was an otherwise great agent whose customers loved her, but Bev always struggled to meet the AHT standard.

Even Bev's AHT improved!

How did we lower AHT?

I spent time debriefing with agents and discovered a counterintuitive insight. The AHT goal itself was the root cause of higher AHT!

That's because agents tend to view an AHT goal as a target, not an average.

On long calls, agents would get anxious when the call time approached the AHT standard. This anxiety eroded listening skills and caused agents to become less friendly. Those issues made it more difficult to guide customers through issues that naturally required more time.

On short calls, agents became too relaxed. If a call was wrapping up well short of the AHT standard, agents would take their time. This made the call go longer than it needed to be, which drove up their average.

Agent stopped doing all that during the experiment.

That's why the calls became much more variable. Agents would spend the time they needed to guide a customer through a difficult issue. They would focus on quickly helping a customer if the customer had a simple issue or was in a hurry.

Now, here's the weird thing. I later ran similar experiments with contact centers that didn't hold their agents to an AHT goal, but did share the AHT stats with agents.

The same issue occurred there, even without the goal. Agents looked at the average as a target.

How to decrease AHT today

The secret to lowering AHT today is to ask your agents to stop thinking about AHT. Remove it from their scorecard and get rid of any reports or displays that remind them of an AHT target.

Instead, ask your agents to focus on helping each customer as efficiently as possible.

You don't have to take my word for it. Try running the experiment yourself and note what happens. You can even separate your contact center into two teams, a test and a control group, so you can compare the results of your own experiment.

Additional Resources

Here are a few additional resources that can help you reduce AHT even more.

  1. Three ways to effortlessly cut AHT

  2. Improve your call control skills (Myra Golden interview)

  3. How first contact resolution improves AHT

Five customer service tips for people with ADHD

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Customer service is hard.

It requires a lot of focus, calm nerves, and the ability to work through multiple distractions. All of that gets a lot harder when you have ADHD.

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. There are three general types:

  • Inattentive

  • Hyperactive

  • Combined

Many common ADHD symptoms spell danger for someone who works in customer service:

  • Lack of focus

  • Hyperfocus (this makes it hard to notice your surroundings)

  • Poor time management

  • Weak impulse control

  • Poor emotional regulation

You can read more about ADHD and common symptoms here.

I have combined-type ADHD, which means I naturally struggle with both attention and hyperactivity. This was a huge challenge for me when I was growing up. In grade school, I frequently got in trouble for disrupting the class and was a master procrastinator when it came to homework.

While ADHD is still very present in my life today, I've learned some techniques that have helped me thrive. Here are five tips that work well for me.

Getting outside is one of the best ways to recharge my brain and restore my ability to focus. This is me standing atop Los Pinos Peak on a sunny day.

Tip #1: Create a vision

Nothing helps me focus on the right things better than a vision.

A vision acts as a compass to always point me in the right direction and get me back on course when I start to lose focus. Think of it as your overall intent when serving a customer.

For example, my vision is "Your Service Culture Guide." My clients come to me because they want to develop a customer-focused culture, so I always keep in mind that I'm there to guide them on their journey.

As an individual, you can create your own vision by completing the Thank You Letter Challenge. It's a fun exercise where you imagine a customer was so delighted with your service that they wrote you a thank you letter. The goal is to receive that same feedback from a real customer.

Visions can be even more powerful for teams or entire organizations. Incredible things happen when everyone is focused on the same goal. You can use this step-by-step guide to create a vision for your organization.

Tip #2: Manage Distractions

Consciously reducing and avoiding distractions can be a game-changer.

The world of customer service is full of distractions. Multiple customers vie for your attention. Coworkers constantly interrupt. Our computers flash pop-ups and our phones beep and buzz all day.

This is a huge challenge for anyone, let alone people with ADHD.

Fortunately, many of these distractions can easily be reduced or eliminated. Here are just a few examples of how I do this:

  • Reduce Notifications: Turn off unnecessary phone and computer notifications.

  • Clear Clutter: Keep a clean workspace to make it easy to find things.

  • Get Quiet: Find a quiet space to work on tasks that require concentration.

  • Rotate Tasks: Move to different tasks throughout the day to avoid zoning out.

  • Take Breaks: Recharge by taking regular breaks.

I asked people on LinkedIn to share their best tips for managing distractions and received some great advice.

Tip #3: Create a System

Customer service professionals need to keep track of a million little details. ADHD brains aren't good at doing that, but you can build a system to do it for you.

David Allen's classic book, Getting Things Done, provides the perfect blueprint for getting organized. Rather than sharing a rigid process, the book contains a set of principles for building a time management system you can trust.

For example, putting all of your reminders in one place, such as your customer relationship management (CRM) software or on your calendar, can reduce the amount of follow-up items that get lost on scribbled notepads, stickie notes on your computer monitor, and countless other places.

I read Getting Things Done over 20 years ago and the impact has been huge. Close friends and family members think I'm naturally organized and don't even know I have ADHD.


Tip #4: Buy Time

My boss often had to remind me to smile when I first started working as a cashier in a clothing store. I'd get so focused on ringing up transactions that the look of concentration on my face inadvertently looked like a scowl.

I was always worried about missing a simple detail, which happens a lot to me if I'm not careful. Eventually, I realized I could avoid mistakes and create better connections with customer by buying just a little time.

As a cashier, this meant trying to build rapport with each customer before starting their transaction. I'd chat a little while I scanned the customer's items and removed the security tag from each one. Then I would slow down and focus while I processed their payment because that was the moment when I needed to get things right.

I was free to engage with the customer once again after the payment was complete.

Try to find those moments in your own work. Identify situations where you need to slow things down and buy some time. Give yourself permission to express your natural creativity at other times.

Today, I support more than 10,000 Customer Service Tip of the Week subscribers on my own. I'm able to do this because it's almost exclusively via email. I can read each message carefully and respond thoughtfully to avoid misunderstandings or repeat messages.

Tip #5: Use Pomodoro

The Pomodoro Technique helps me when I really need to concentrate on an important task. Here's how it works:

  1. Pick a task you want to focus on.

  2. Set a timer for 25 minutes.

  3. Give yourself permission to focus on that task until the timer goes off.

  4. Take a short break.

  5. Pick a new task.

It's amazing how quickly you can get absorbed in doing work this way!

Resources

People with ADHD can face a lot of challenges at work. Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) has a great overview.

ADHD can be considered a workplace disability. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires most employers to make reasonable accommodations to help people with disabilities do their jobs.

Consider asking for an accommodation if you've been diagnosed with ADHD and struggle at work. You can learn more from this article.

Finally, I've found ADHD 2.0 to be an invaluable book for learning about ADHD and discovering strategies for to maximize my effectiveness.