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CUSTOMERSERVICE09082003
By Bill Perry
Charleston Regional Business Journal 09/08/2003
CUSTOMER
SERVICE
Flying fish:
What can we learn from a seafood market?
Walk
into the training classrooms of many local organizations and you’ll think you
are visiting the South Carolina Aquarium. Fish are everywhere…on the walls,
hanging from the ceiling, stuffed ones being thrown around by instructors and
students. What’s with all the fish?
It turns out that one of the most
popular training videos currently on the market in the area of customer service
is called Fish. Based on the
best-selling book of the same name by Stephen C. Lundin, the video tells the
story of the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, Wash., where buying and selling
fish are much more than business transactions…they are just plain fun.
In the book and video (and workbook,
etc. distributed by Charthouse Learning), we go behind the scenes at the fish
market and learn the four pillars of philosophy of the 12 guys who run the
place:
Play. “Have fun at work” is the
golden rule at the Pike Place Fish Market. Throwing fish to each other,
shouting out customer orders (“five crabs flying away”), laughing and joking
with each other and with the customers are but a few ways they have fun.
“Any job can be boring if you make it
boring, but we choose to make it fun,” proclaims one of the fishmongers.
Not bad advice. What are some ways you
can make your jobs more fun, even if you can’t throw your computer across the
office? The ways are out there. You just need to be creative about finding them.
Make their day. At the fish market,
fun is not limited to the employees. In fact, as soon as a customer walks into
the place, it is hard not to have
fun. You may even be invited to don an apron, go behind the counter and catch a
fish thrown from 20 feet away.
“We want to share the fun we are having
with our customers,” says one of the employees.
Think about ways you can make your
customers’ (or co-workers’) day. It may be something as simple as smiling or
spending a few minutes of quality time talking about a common interest or a
concern the other person has. What’s more, most of the time that you make
someone else’s day, you also make you own.
Be There. Ever been talking with
someone and you get the feeling the other person is hearing but not really listening to what you are saying? Or
have you gone to a restaurant and had a server who merely went through the
motions of taking your order without showing any real interest in you?
Being there means focusing intently on
the customer or co-worker, listening carefully, and responding in a friendly,
thoughtful manner. Not an easy thing to do in our fast paced, technology-driven
world where everyone has one cell phone and many have two.
At the fish market, being there means
staying alert to customers around the store and making each one feel like they
are a best friend, even if only for a few seconds of conversation. A real art!
Choose your attitude. “I don’t want
to get up at 5:30 every morning, but I have to, and I can instantly choose
either to be angry or upset inside or to have a positive attitude,” says
another fish market employee.
Does anyone doubt the importance of
attitude in our life and work?
Try something for me. Write the letters
of the word ATTITUDE down the left side of a piece of paper and next to each
letter write the order of that letter in the alphabet (A=1, T=20, etc). Now add
up the column of numbers. The result says it all about the relative importance
of a positive attitude.
Next time you’re in Seattle, check out
the Pike Place Fish Market and see the fun they’re having. I sure plan to.
Bill Perry is president of the Charleston Center
for High Performance Organizations. He co-authored the book, “Exceptional
Customer Service” with Lisa Ford and David McNair, and gives seminars and
speeches on customer focus. To send stories or request information about
seminars, e-mail billperry829@aol.com.
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