Differing Time Management Perspectives in a Global Customer Service World

Differing Time Management Perspectives in a Global Customer Service World

As a service provider, you may encounter someone whose view of time differs significantly from yours. You should learn to adapt. Many cultures view the past, present and future differently and may place more or less importance on them than others outside their culture do. This may put a strain on the customer-provider relationship if you are not aware of their perspective or are not willing to make concessions for the differences.

Implications of time perspective differences vary greatly throughout the world. In countries like China, if you are late for a business meeting you might lose face or somehow make them feel disrespected. In other countries, you might be expected to wait for your customers, even when you have a set appointment time. For example, if you are in sales and travel to other parts of the world, you might arrive expecting a meeting at a certain time and date, only to find out that the person you are supposed to meet is out of the office or on vacation even though you called the week before to verify the appointment. Even so, always verify meetings multiple times and in writing before proceeding to them, especially if your customer is from outside your culture. Keeping subordinates and foreign businesspeople waiting for an extended period of time even when there is a scheduled appointment is not uncommon in some countries (e.g. Middle Eastern), especially when a higher-level executive is involved. Expect this and be prepared to wait patiently.

When dealing with customers who frequent your organization, if you are serving someone from another culture, you may find that they show up late for appointments. To compensate, you have to decide whether to build in some flexibility to your schedule or to turn a customer away when they arrive late. Obviously, the latter could mean a breakdown in the customer-provider relationship or a lost customer.

The bottom line on dealing with cultural perspectives on time is to recognize that there are differences. As a result, you may have to change your own mindset if you plan to do business with people from other countries ad cultures. Making such adjustments can lead to opportunities for providing customer service excellence and building a reputation as a service professional who is keenly aware of global diversity.

For more guidance on dealing with cultural differences when delivering service in a diverse world, read Customer Service Skills for Success and Please Every Customer: Delivering Stellar Customer Service Across Cultures.

Robert C. Lucas

About Robert C. Lucas

Bob Lucas has been a trainer, presenter, customer service expert, and adult educator for over four decades. He has written hundreds of articles on training, writing, self-publishing, and workplace learning skills and issues. He is also an award-winning author who has written thirty-seven books on topics such as, writing, relationships, customer service, brain-based learning, and creative training strategies, interpersonal communication, diversity, and supervisory skills. Additionally, he has contributed articles, chapters, and activities to eighteen compilation books. Bob retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1991 after twenty-two years of active and reserve service.

Make Money Writing Books: Proven Profit Making Strategies for Authors by Robert W. Lucas at Amazon.com.

The key to successfully making money as an author and/or self-publisher is to brand yourself and your company and to make yourself and your book(s) a household name. Part of this is face-to-face interaction with people at trade shows, library events, book readings, book store signings, blogging or guest blogging on a topic related to their book(s). Another strategy involves writing articles and other materials that show up online and are found when people search for a given topic related to a topic about which the author has written.

If you need help building an author platform, branding yourself and your book(s) or generating recognition for what you do, Make Money Writing Books will help. Bob’s popular book addresses a multitude of ideas and strategies that you can use to help sell more books and create residual and passive income streams. The tips outlined in the book are focused to help authors but apply to virtually any professional trying to increase personal and product recognition and visibility.

Preparing to Serve a Diverse Customer Base

Preparing to Serve a Diverse Customer Base

Many organizations and employees have realized the importance of creating a fair and equal environment in which everyone feels respected and valued. This is especially important in a service environment where employees encounter customers who have different characteristics.

Preparing to Serve a Diverse Customer Base

Providing good customer service can be challenging on any given day. That is why updating customer service skills is a crucial part of professional development for any customer service representative. And, when you factor in elements of diversity, providing great customer service can become difficult for many service providers who lack sufficient knowledge and experience in dealing with diverse individuals.

To ensure that you are ready for potential situations in which you will be serving people of different age, gender, ability, cultural and religious background, and numerous other diversity factors, consider participating in the following initiatives:

  • Honestly evaluate your own biases towards people from a given group and develop some strategies for overcoming them.
  • Visit a restaurant that serves ethnic foods other than that of your native culture.
  • Share your own story with someone from a different group (e.g. age, gender, ethnic background, or religion) and see how their life experiences compare or differ from yours.
  • Identify at least one resource for diversity information and visit it each month.
  • Take a language course to learn a new language.
  • Visit a religious institution, museum or historical monument of a culture different from your own.
  • Volunteer to work with people whose race, age, gender, or cultural backgrounds are different from your own.

For more ideas and strategies on dealing with customers who have diverse backgrounds that may be different from yours, read Customer Service Skills for Success and Please Every Customer: Delivering Stellar Customer Service Across Cultures.

Impact of Values and Beliefs on Customer Service

Impact of Values and Beliefs on Customer Service

Values are based on the deeply held beliefs of a culture or subculture. These beliefs might be founded in religion, politics, or group mores. They drive thinking and actions and are so powerful that they have served as the basis for arguments, conflicts, and wars for hundreds of years.

Impact of Values and Beliefs on Customer Service

To be effective in dealing with others, service providers should not ignore the power of values and beliefs, nor should they think that their value system is better than that of someone else’s. The key to service success is to be open-minded and accept that someone else has a different belief system that determines his or her needs. With this in mind you, as a service provider, should strive to use all the positive communication and needs identification you have read about thus far in order to satisfy the customer.

Cultural values can be openly expressed or subtly demonstrated through behavior. They can affect your interactions with your customers in a variety of ways. As you encounter people from cultures other than yours, consider the connection of values with behavior. Also, think of ways that you might adjust your approach to customer service in order to ensure a satisfactory experience for diverse customers. Keep in mind that the degree to which customers have been acculturated to prominent cultural standards will determine how they act.

Your goal is to provide excellent service to the customer. In order to achieve success in accomplishing this goal, you must be sensitive to, tolerant of, and empathetic toward customers. You do not need to adopt the beliefs of others, but you should adapt to them to the extent that you provide the best service possible to all of your customers.

For useful ideas and strategies on better understanding and interacting with people from diverse backgrounds, get a copy of Please Every Customer: Delivering Stellar Customer Service Across Cultures.

Delivering Customer Service to a Diverse Customer Base

Delivering Customer Service to a Diverse Customer Base

Personal awareness on the part of customer service representatives is the first step in delivering customer service to a diverse customer base.

The word diversity encompasses a broad range of differences. Many people only associate the term diversity with cultural diversity, which has to do with the differences between groups of people, depending on their country of origin, backgrounds, and beliefs. They fail to recognize that diversity is not just cultural. Certainly, diversity occurs within each cultural group; however, many other characteristics are involved. For example, within a group of Japanese people are subgroups such as different generations, males, females, children, athletes, thin people, gay or lesbian people, Buddhists, Christians, grandparents, married and single people, to mention just a few of the possible diverse characteristics, beliefs, and values.

Diversity is not a simple matter, yet it is not difficult to deal with. Start your journey to a better understanding of diversity by being fair to all people and keeping an open mind when interacting with them. In fact, when you look more closely at and think about, diversity it provides wonderful opportunities because people from varying groups and geographic locations bring with them special knowledge, experience, and value. This is because even though people may have differences or potentially look different, they also have many traits in common. Their similarities form a solid basis for successful interpersonal relationships if you are knowledgeable and think of people as individuals; you can then capitalize on their uniqueness. If you cannot think of the person instead of the group, you may stereotype people—lump them together and treat them all the same. This is a recipe for interpersonal disaster, service breakdown and organizational failure.

Some diversity factors that make people different are innate and they are born with them, such as height, weight, hair color, gender, skin color, physical and mental condition, and sibling birth order. All these factors contribute to our uniqueness and help or inhibit us throughout our lives, depending on the perceptions we and others have. Other factors that make us unique are learned or gained through our environment and our life experiences. Examples of these factors include religion, values, beliefs, economic level, lifestyle choices, profession, marital status, education, and political affiliation. These factors are often used to assign people to categories. Caution must be used when considering any of these characteristics since grouping people can lead to stereotyping and possible discrimination.

The bottom line is that all of these factors affect each customer encounter. Your awareness of differences and of your own preferences is crucial in determining the success you will have in each instance.

To learn more about providing quality service to all your customers, explore Please Every Customer: Delivering Stellar Customer Service Across Cultures and other current books on the topic of the Delivering Customer Service to a Diverse Customer Base.

About Robert W. Lucas

Bob Lucas has been a trainer, presenter, customer service expert, and adult educator for over four decades. He has written hundreds of articles on training, writing, self-publishing, and workplace learning skills and issues. He is also an award-winning author who has written thirty-seven books on topics such as, writing, relationships, customer service, brain-based learning, and creative training strategies, interpersonal communication, diversity, and supervisory skills. Additionally, he has contributed articles, chapters, and activities to eighteen compilation books. Bob retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1991 after twenty-two years of active and reserve service.

Make Money Writing Books: Proven Profit Making Strategies for Authors by Robert W. Lucas at Amazon.com.

The key to successfully making money as an author and/or self-publisher is to brand yourself and your company and to make yourself and your book(s) a household name. Part of this is face-to-face interaction with people at trade shows, library events, book readings, book store signings, blogging or guest blogging on a topic related to their book(s). Another strategy involves writing articles and other materials that show up online and are found when people search for a given topic related to a topic about which the author has written.

If you need help building an author platform, branding yourself and your book(s) or generating recognition for what you do, Make Money Writing Books will help. Bob’s popular book addresses a multitude of ideas and strategies that you can use to help sell more books and create residual and passive income streams. The tips outlined in the book are focused to help authors but apply to virtually any professional trying to increase personal and product recognition and visibility.

Successfully Addressing Diversity as a Service Provider

Successfully Addressing Diversity as a Service Provider

As the world grows smaller economically and otherwise through world trade, international travel, outsourcing and off shoring of jobs, worldwide Internet access, international partnerships between organizations and technologically transmitted information exchange, the likelihood that you will have contact as a customer service provider with people from other cultures, or who are different from you in other ways, increases significantly. This likelihood also carries over into your personal life.

Diversity is encountered everywhere over the telephone and Internet, in supermarkets, religious organizations, and on public transportation and virtually anywhere that you come into contact with others. It is an important aspect of everyone’s life. Although it presents challenges in making us think of differences and similarities, it also enriches our lives. Each encounter we have with another person gives us an opportunity to expand our knowledge of others and build customer relationships while growing personally.

One significant impact that diversity has on customer service is that people from varied backgrounds and cultures bring with them expectations based on personal preferences and the “norm” of their country or group. Whether this diversity pertains to cultural or ethnic differences, beliefs, values, religion, age, gender, ability levels or other factors a potential breakdown in customer satisfaction can occur if people get other than what they want or expect.

In order to provide excellent customer service rather than good customer service, you will need to raise your personal awareness about others and focus on addressing the needs of a diverse customer base.

Part of creating a positive diverse customer-centric business environment is to train each service provider on the nuances of dealing with people who have backgrounds that are different from their own. Additionally, this effort involves each employee taking ownership for enhancing his or her knowledge and skills related to working with a diverse customer base.

To better prepare for the inevitable opportunities, you will have in serving others who are different from you, ask yourself the following questions. After thinking about them, set out to do some research in areas where you feel deficient.

  • How do you define diversity?
  • What do you already know about diverse cultures around the world?
  • In what ways do your cultural beliefs and values differ from those of cultures with which you have contact as a service provider?
  • In what ways are your cultural beliefs and values similar to those of cultures with which you have contact as a service provider?
  • How do the beliefs and expectations of people from a gender other than your own impact your ability to serve them effectively?
  • How do the values of other generations differ from your own?
  • What accommodations might be necessary for customers who have special needs?
  • What is your personal interest in learning about other cultures or diverse groups?
  • What training or research have you done on diversity and how has that impacted your views or perspectives towards others who may be different from you?

Successfully Addressing Diversity as a Service Provider For ideas and strategies on providing quality customer service to a diverse population, check out, Please Every Customer: Delivering Stellar Customer Service Across Cultures.

About Robert W. Lucas

Bob Lucas has been a trainer, presenter, customer service expert, and adult educator for over four decades. He has written hundreds of articles on training, writing, self-publishing, and workplace learning skills and issues. He is also an award-winning author who has written thirty-seven books on topics such as, writing, relationships, customer service, brain-based learning, and creative training strategies, interpersonal communication, diversity, and supervisory skills. Additionally, he has contributed articles, chapters, and activities to eighteen compilation books. Bob retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1991 after twenty-two years of active and reserve service.

Make Money Writing Books: Proven Profit Making Strategies for Authors by Robert W. Lucas at Amazon.com.

The key to successfully making money as an author and/or self-publisher is to brand yourself and your company and to make yourself and your book(s) a household name. Part of this is face-to-face interaction with people at trade shows, library events, book readings, book store signings, blogging or guest blogging on a topic related to their book(s). Another strategy involves writing articles and other materials that show up online and are found when people search for a given topic related to a topic about which the author has written.

If you need help building an author platform, branding yourself and your book(s) or generating recognition for what you do, Make Money Writing Books will help. Bob’s popular book addresses a multitude of ideas and strategies that you can use to help sell more books and create residual and passive income streams. The tips outlined in the book are focused to help authors but apply to virtually any professional trying to increase personal and product recognition and visibility.

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