Thoughts on Customer Service & Critical Thinking

The other day, I was talking with my cousins, and we got on the subject of cell phones. More specifically, customer service with cell phone companies. Both of my cousins had horror stories of the awful customer service they had gotten with AT&T. One of my cousins has a good friend who owns 40-something Verizon stores, and she was telling us how at his stores, customer service is the big push. On the bottom of every single one of the receipts at any one of his stores, his personal cell phone number is printed. If an employee fails to provide good service, they are no longer employed. Customer service is their main focus. At those 40 something stores, customers are the top priority.

A little bit later I was reading Seth Godin's book "Tribes". I came across a quote that said

"Many organizations go out of their way to hire people who color inside the
lines, who demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then these
organizations give these people jobs where they are managed via fear."
(Pg 97)

This helps explain a lot of the bad customer service at places like cell phone stores and some of the crazy TSA airport security incidents--in following orders, people don't have the freedom to make judgements and decisions on a case by case basis. Everything is done strictly by the book, and in being scared to stray away from the pre-written rules, customers are alienated, because the rules don't always work for every situation.

So... as I do with most things, I started thinking about all of this through the lens of camp. How does it apply to us?

Camp is a great place to learn to deliver customer service. We deal with so many unique situations, that sticking strictly to the rules taught during staff training doesn't always work. Of course, there are important rules to learn before the summer starts but there is no way to come up with a rule to cover every single possible situation. And so camp staff are taught to think on their feet, to refer to the rules but then to improvise to make sure we are dealing with the situation at hand--not some pre-fabricated situation with a ready-made set of rules.

I think that one of the greatest benefits that camp can give to their staff members--and their campers--is teaching them how to make choices and decisions by using critical thinking skills.

I remember Sunday night after Sunday night during the summer, sitting in the dining hall with a new batch of campers, while our director would go over the rules for camp. They were quite simple--in fact, most know them as the YMCA Character Traits of honesty, respect, responsibility, and caring. Every Sunday he would tell us that those character traits summed up the rules for camp--and they do. If you take the time to run your decisions past those filters, you usually come up with the right answers.

If you are working anywhere that deals with people--most likely you will encounter situations that can't quite fit into the boxes we have set out, neatly organized by rules. But with a little bit of critical thinking, and the right filters to run your decisions by--you'll probably be just fine.

Rules can change and be hard to keep track of. Kids are going to school in an era that is more and more focused on teaching to the test, and less and less focused on letting them think for themselves. The less kids learn about critical thinking in school, the more valuable the camp experience becomes.