Top traits of exceptional service leaders

Does your team take care of your customers as well as you’d like? Do they feel you care about them as much as you do your customers? The truth is, leadership has the single biggest impact on customer experience. Happy customers are the result of a happy team. But what does it take to get this right?

In the new book, They Serve Like We Lead, customer service specialist Monique Richardson shows how caring for your people is at the heart of all service leadership. Drawing upon decades of experience and examples of exceptional service-driven leaders and organisations across all sectors, Monique explores how customer and employee experience are inextricably linked and the importance of both.

In this extract from the book, Monique shares the traits of service leaders that their people value deeply.

They engage the team in the vision and the purpose

Service leaders have a way of connecting the team with the organisation’s vision and purpose. They ensure each team member knows the importance of their role and how they fit into the big picture. This is very powerful in creating a service culture, as each person needs to see why what they do matters.

I recall a conversation with an exceptional people leader in a cleaning chemical business. In a hospital lift, he had chatted with a cleaner about
their work. The cleaner said, ‘I’m not important. I am just a PSA (Patient Services Attendant)’. The leader replied, ‘You have one of the most important roles in this hospital. Your work saves lives’. In that moment, he helped the team member see the purpose of their work and the bigger picture of their role in infection control. He made them feel important.

One of my personal service leader heroes is the late Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos. The company is famous for its employee and customer experience. Its mission is ‘Delivering happiness’. Zappos has ten core values that help achieve its purpose, one of which is ‘Deliver WOW through service’. The leaders live and breathe the organisation’s purpose. It is the focus of recruitment, onboarding and induction and is part of the company’s DNA. Zappos was sold to Amazon in 2009 in a deal worth around US$1.2 billion, proving that you can take care of your people and customers and still be highly profitable and successful.

They spend time with customers on the frontline

Great service leaders get in and get their hands dirty. Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines is known to jump behind the counter and serve customers. He regularly travels on flights asking customers for feedback and taking notes for future action. True service leaders happily serve customers on the
frontline when it is busy or just make it part of their monthly plan to ensure they are visible and close to the customer and the team.

In one organisation I worked with, the CEO and directors spent time taking customer calls in the contact centre. During his time as CEO of Telstra, David Thodey AO was known for calling customers regarding their complaints. This action built rapport and connection with customers and had a powerful impact on the team. In his words, ‘leaders need to be seen talking to and about customers, asking questions, listening to their stories,
making a difference. Real change comes from real actions’.

Gail Kelly was the first woman CEO of Westpac, one of Australia’s big four banks. An incredibly successful leader, she led a cultural transformation
by putting people and customers at the heart of the organisation. After a brief career in teaching, Gail began in customer service as a bank teller and
loved the engagement of a customer-facing role. This passion continued throughout her career. As CEO, maintaining engagement with customers
and people was a core priority. She had a rigorous schedule that included making calls to customers each Friday and a full day every quarter, where
she went out to branches to spend time with customers and team members.

They empower the team to make decisions

Teams need to feel trusted to know they can help in the moment without reverting to unnecessary rules and processes. They must feel empowered
through decision-making and discretionary spending to help the customer without needing to refer to their leader, while knowing they can always ask the leader for support.

Even when a team member seeks advice, a service leader uses this as a coaching opportunity and asks, ‘What would you like to do for the customer?’ using an empowering question as a teaching moment rather than telling.

They remember people’s names and details

From the CEO to the team leader, frontline people consistently mention this as a standout attribute. While it is easy to remember your team members’ names, it makes a massive impact when the leader remembers everyone’s name, their children or pets, and even where they were going on holiday. Such conversations profoundly impact how a team feels about a leader.

At the end of the day, we all walk around with an invisible sign on our heads that reads ‘Make me feel important’. The little things count, and exceptional service leaders show genuine care and interest in people and create meaningful connections in their everyday interactions.

They are fair and consistent

Fairness is often raised by team members when describing exceptional service leaders. This is highlighted by leaders who appreciate differences
yet apply standards consistently. They gain respect from the team by being clear in their expectations and not showing favouritism. They are open and transparent. Everyone knows where they stand, which generates high trust in the leader and builds team morale.

They recognise freely and easily

Successful service leaders have an abundance mindset regarding recognition and have developed this as a daily leadership habit. They make use of opportunities to recognise individuals and the team. They sincerely and genuinely thank their team at the end of each day and focus on formal and informal recognition.

Gratitude is the foundation of a service leadership mindset. Service leaders continually look for ways to show care and appreciation. Celebrating people shows how much you value them.

They ask for feedback from the team and take action

One of the most powerful attributes of a service leader is regularly asking the team for feedback, ideas and opinions and then listening to that feedback and taking action. Many of the best ideas for improvement come from the frontline. I refer to this as the ‘goldmine of frontline feedback’. Frontline team members are closest to the customer and often bring brilliant ideas for improving the customer experience. They hear customer pain points, challenges and struggles and have suggestions for making the customer experience easier and more positive.

This goes beyond the annual engagement survey; it must include giving people a formal and informal outlet to continually raise problems and ideas. Service leaders have a regular cadence of checking in with the team to obtain their feedback and work to close the feedback loop.

The leader has the team’s back

One of the most important things for a team member is to feel that the leader has their back. Even if a decision is not in line with what the team member has advised the customer, the leader will explain why they have done so. People always give their best when they know their leader has their back. This is integral in creating a high-trust environment.

They protect their people at all times and will not tolerate customer abuse

A critical responsibility of every leader is to ensure the protection, safety and wellbeing of team members. This includes having clear policies and
procedures to safeguard the team, with training, coaching and support to equip them to deal with challenging customer situations. A service leader
makes themselves available for escalations and supports the team member when a customer displays unacceptable conduct.

A customer’s behaviour may mean they are asked to leave the premises, a call is terminated or, in serious cases, they are restricted from accessing the business. I worked with a prestige car dealership whose Dealer Principal banned a customer from entering their premises; such was the level of abuse they had directed at the receptionist. It is the right of every team member to feel safe at work, and the service leader must ensure they are protected at all times.

Growing levels of customer aggression bring increased organisational and leadership responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of all team members. Clear boundaries must be established, including implementing and socialising the organisation’s unacceptable customer conduct policy and clear escalation paths. Training is also a leadership priority, ensuring team members have the skills to diffuse and de-escalate difficult and aggressive behaviour with immediate post-incident support.

They hold the team to high standards

Exceptional service leaders demand excellence. They expect very high personal standards of themselves and others and hold the team accountable to the customer. From the team member’s perspective, this is positive and motivates them to achieve results. The leader is very clear about the
standards the team must meet. They are there to support, mentor and coach the team to help each individual and the team to meet their goals.

In his book Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze, the founder of the Ritz-Carlton, wrote of his first teacher, ‘He didn’t only inspire us; he also held us to high standards’. Accountability can be done humanely. It is not about driving people into the ground with unrealistic expectations. It is creating a culture of excellence and an expectation that the team delivers a high standard of service for every customer. Every day.

They focus on team strengths

I always remember a conversation with the founder and owner of a successful real estate agency group during a customer service awards presentation I was judging. He shared that the sales agents didn’t do any administration. In his words, they were terrible with paperwork and generally had low levels of attention to detail. Yet their strengths were their relationships with customers and their ability to sell. He had set up the working environment so that each agent had strong administrative support. This led to happier team members and happier customers. The seamless workflow and high levels of responsiveness due to job design ultimately increased sales, customer satisfaction and referrals.

The VIA Institute on Character and Gallup have researched strength-based approaches in the workplace based on Martin Seligman’s work with positive psychology. In one study, Gallup found that employees feel more confident, self-aware and productive when focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses. This leads to higher employee engagement, increased performance and significantly lower attrition rates.

Service leaders shift from a weakness-focused mindset to a strength-based approach with their team and each individual.

They eliminate top-down language

Language is critically important in service leadership. In conversations with leaders, I sometimes hear, ‘We need to focus on customer service
from the top down or the bottom up’. For me, that’s like fingernails across a blackboard. It may seem like a small thing, but language dramatically
impacts those who hear it. The language of ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’ leadership is outdated, counterproductive and disempowering. Exceptional service leaders don’t use the terms such as the ‘people beneath me’ or refer to their team as ‘subordinates’.

It is disingenuous to describe customer service professionals as being at the bottom of the organisation while simultaneously saying they are cared
about and important.

They invert the traditional pyramid

One of my first full-time roles was working as a customer service representative in the Optus Communications contact centre. It was when they first entered the marketplace as Telstra’s main competitor. I vividly remember attending the initial interview, where they drew the inverted pyramid on the whiteboard and explained the importance of customers and the frontline. I sat at the back of the room thinking that while it looked fine in theory, my experience in other workplaces meant I shrugged it off as an interesting marketing and PR exercise.

It wasn’t until I had secured the role and started working with Optus that I saw their incredible focus on the team and the customer. It began as soon as I was hired and continued throughout my orientation and training. The way the organisation and the leaders valued the frontline team was
reflected in how we were treated, our pay and our benefits. We were cared about and supported, and the leaders maintained an unrelenting focus on
the customer experience. They lived and breathed the inverted pyramid model in their words and actions.

If you have access to an organisational chart, it’s an interesting exercise to turn it upside down. Notice who is at the bottom — the people who talk
to your customers. By flipping it, the CEO and the leadership serve those who serve the customers. In the words of leadership legend Ken Blanchard, ‘How can you serve your customers with excellence when your people are serving the CEO?’.

They lead with empathy and compassion

Emotional intelligence and levels of self-awareness are characteristics of exceptional service leaders. While empathy has always been a crucial leadership trait, with the many challenges facing individuals, teams and businesses today, it is taking on a new level of importance. Many teams are doing it tough, with team member shortages, increasingly impatient customers, delays and pressures and challenging demands. The world needs empathetic leaders more than ever.

The best service leaders I have met and worked with have all had high levels of emotional intelligence and the ability to demonstrate empathy for their team and customers. It makes a critical difference to team member engagement. A study by Catalyst revealed that 76% of people who experienced empathy from their leaders reported they were engaged, compared with only 32% who experienced less empathy.

Compassion is another essential attribute. While the words empathy and compassion are often used interchangeably, empathy is an emotion felt for and with others, whereas compassion goes beyond emotion to include the active intention to help others. ‘Compassion occurs when we take a step away from empathy and ask ourselves what we can do to support the person.’ Leaders who demonstrate both empathy and compassion create much stronger connections and trust with team members.

They lead by example

Great service leaders lead by example. One of the most powerful examples of service leadership in action I have ever witnessed was during a training
workshop for the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) — ground managers of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). While the training extended to everyone in frontline and support roles, we commenced the project exactly where all customer service transformation projects need to start — with
the leadership team.

Stephen Gough (CEO of the MCC from 1999-2017) attended one of the early workshops to welcome the group and stay for part of the session. As he sat, he noticed a couple of customers who looked lost. Without a word, Gough jumped out of his seat, took them where they needed to go and quietly
returned to the training room. In that moment, nothing was more powerful than the example he had just shown. While we explored the theme of service leadership, his actions spoke louder than anything I could have said.

This was the same leader who remembered people’s names and conversations and made everyone feel important. He was universally loved and admired because of his genuine care and connection with his people and customers. When things were busy and there were problems or issues, he served with his frontline people at the entry gate. Stephen Gough is one of the most inspiring and humble leaders I’ve ever met.

The best service leaders lead by actions, not words. The saying ‘It’s not what you say, it’s what you do that counts’ is never more critical than when
leading customer teams and aiming to build a service-driven culture.

They genuinely care about their people and their customers

Caring deeply for the team and customers is an essential trait in every service leader. One of my first jobs in retail was working for a beauty products company.

Lucy Lewis was a much-loved leader in the business. She was very hands- on, often visiting and spending time in all the stores. We looked forward to her visits — not only for how she interacted and engaged with us but for what we learnt from watching her with customers. Lucy had a way of engaging customers that was so genuine and authentic. She always made them laugh with her wonderful sense of humour.

Soon after I started work with the business, I became seriously ill and spent three weeks in hospital. You can imagine my surprise and joy when Lucy visited me with a gift. I still remember it as an act of care and kindness all these years later.

Service leaders have care at the core of their being. Leaders who take care of their people so they can take care of the customer will always get the best results. Kind, caring, empathetic and inspiring leaders create an environment where their teams will thrive. There is a strong feeling of mutual trust and respect.

In the words of servant leadership expert Ken Blanchard: ‘The most effective leaders I know are just good human beings, they care about people. They listen more than they talk. They want to help people win. That’s about caring and it’s about your heart’. Caring leaders create long-term success by improving employees’ wellbeing, teamwork, engagement and overall organisational performance. It is the role of every service leader to communicate how much they care about their people through their words and actions.

This article is an extract from the book They Serve Like We Lead by Monique Richardson, an expert in service leadership and customer service.