If you want to improve your customer service, you need to get more out of your employees: more passion, more engagement, more commitment to solving problems and finding solutions.  And the way to get more from your employees? Stop treating them as expendable, as items on a spreadsheet, as bodies without brains.
When The Ritz-Carlton Hotel company, which is legendary for its service, proclaims that “We are Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen,” they’re saying something revolutionary and rebellious. They’re expressing a reaction against the idea that there is one superior class of people (the customer) and another, subservient class of people (the employees). As Ritz-Carlton’s president and COO, Herve Humler, explains in my recent interview, “The attitude I strive to get across to my employees is this: ‘You are not servants, because unlike a servant, I want you to be engaged with the customer—you have a brain, you have a heart and I want you to use them.’
This kind of respect for employees and engagement with employees is essential if employees are going to provide creative customer service, customer service with heart. Here are five ways (in addition to providing fair pay, humane and generous benefits, and a safe and pleasant working environment) that a company and its leadership can provide service to its employees and aid those employees in providing great service to their customers.

Checker Brittney Bounds bags groceries for customer Esther Franklin, left, at Compton’s Market Tuesday, (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
  1. Be compassionate.  How can you expect an employee to show warmth and empathy to your customers if you’re docking your employees’ time for unexpected childcare issues, if you’re timing their bathroom breaks, and so forth?    Stop second-guessing frontline employees’ every decision. Give them the power to act on behalf of the customers as best they know how.
  2. Give employees input into the design of their jobs.  To whatever extent employees are constrained in what they need to get done,still involve them in how it is done. I mean this on both a micro and macro level.  On the micro-level, let them infuse their own style in their emails, their phone support, how they design their cubicle.  On the macro level, involve them in decisions that will affect their workday: because who knows better than how to do the work than the people who do it every day?
  3. Celebrate your employees. When they do something great for the customer, give them a “huzzah,” hold tem up as an example to their co-workers.  Brag about them at your town hall meetings and in the company newsletter.
  4. Don’t penalize employees when they make a judgment call that ends up going south–As long as their decision was in favor of the customer. If the employee ultimately got the call wrong/got taken advantage of, spent “too much” money (whatever that means) resolving the issue, it’s just the cost of doing business. You can’t have your employees provide fantastic service and simultaneously operate from a position of fear.