National Customer Service Week: The HEART Model, Principle #4

H– Hear and Understand

E– Expect the Best

A-Act with Integrity

R-Respect Diver­sity

T-Transcend Your­self

We are on the fourth com­po­nent in our “HEART” core val­ues in cus­tomer ser­vice series this week where R means Respect­ing Diver­sity. Let’s talk about respect­ing diver­sity in the con­text of its impor­tance in Synergy.

Syn­ergy. From the Greek word “syn­er­gos,” mean­ing, “work­ing together;” the inter­ac­tion of mul­ti­ple ele­ments in a sys­tem to pro­duce an effect dif­fer­ent from or greater than the sum of their indi­vid­ual effects.

One of the biggest (and per­haps most overused) buzz­words in busi­ness in the last decade is “Syn­ergy“. And for good rea­son. The most suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies are those that are able to har­mo­nize indi­vid­ual tal­ents, abil­i­ties, and dif­fer­ences from within their orga­ni­za­tions towards their objec­tives. But more impor­tantly, suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies also rec­og­nize the impor­tance of involv­ing their cus­tomers, and inte­grat­ing cus­tomer inputs in cre­at­ing and improv­ing their sys­tems and processes.

In the highly-connected busi­ness envi­ron­ment that we oper­ate these days, it is the norm rather than the excep­tion for trans­ac­tions to be con­ducted from sev­eral cor­ners of the world, with cus­tomers from the United States, for exam­ple, being ser­viced by off-site con­tact cen­ter agents in the Philip­pines. There are barriers—mainly lan­guage and cul­ture. But it all works, and works well, because we have grown to respect diver­sity as a way of life.

We speak of diver­sity not just in the tra­di­tional para­me­ters like gen­der, age, nation­al­ity, reli­gion or eth­nic­ity, but entire ways of thinking.

Accord­ing to a recent study by con­sult­ing and pro­fes­sional ser­vices com­pany Deloitte, cul­ti­vat­ing “diver­sity of thought” at your busi­ness can boost inno­va­tion and cre­ative prob­lem solving.

Peo­ple bring dif­fer­ent cul­tures, back­grounds, per­son­al­i­ties and expe­ri­ences to the table — and those dif­fer­ences shape how they think. No one has a monop­oly of all bril­liant ideas, and no sin­gle idea is supe­rior over the other. When we pick out the best of each, we extract the best approach, and achieve our objec­tives most effectively.

In cus­tomer ser­vices, respect­ing diver­sity does not stop at accept­ing that your cus­tomer speaks a dif­fer­ent lan­guage and comes with a per­spec­tive that was formed from half a world away. Sim­ply under­stand­ing that a per­son MAY be see­ing things dif­fer­ently, with an out-of-the-box idea that you would never have seen, can enrich the way we do our work, mak­ing every inter­ac­tion with a cus­tomer a learn­ing experience.

In a world with­out bor­ders, suc­cess comes in respect­ing diver­sity to cre­ate an atmos­phere that allows our dif­fer­ences in world­views to enrich our work, and to ulti­mately come up with a syn­er­gized whole that is greater than the sum of its indi­vid­ual parts.