High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service

chapter 6anticipatory customer serviceyour people

once you’ve defined and codified your culture, what do you need next in order to create anticipatory customer service? You need people—the right people.

Here’s the first thing to know about hiring. Attitude, rather than technical skill, is what’s most important in a prospective employee. Although you’ve probably heard this voiced before as a platitude, it’s a difficult point to actually get across in our technology-obsessed age, but it’s crucial. You can teach technical skills, at least the technical skills needed for customer service situations, to prospective employees who fall within a wide range of technical aptitude. Often, in fact, unlearning poorly taught technical skills is difficult, ...