Is good customer service a skill or an attitude? Is it process or culture? Does a well trained agent or a tight, well thought out process produce a more satisfying customer experience than a less polished execution of the procedure by an enthusiastic agent who seems to really enjoy working with people and care about the customer’s issue?

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There is no doubt that there are identifiable (and teachable, learn-able) skills required to produce excellent service. Problem solving skills, communication skills, product and organizational knowledge and technical skills among others. A friendly, empathetic agent without an ability to provide much actual assistance is not going to produce happy customers for very long.

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Yet how many times have we dealt with the Mr. Spocks of customer service? Cold, logical, efficient and able to get our problem resolved, but lacking anything remotely resembling empathy and leaving us with the clear impression that he would much rather be doing something else than dealing with (your problem here)-challenged people like you? Which experience did you find to be the more “satisfying”?

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Eileen Brownell, President of California-based Training Solutions, argues in a recent article that “The most important quality an individual must have to succeed in business or in life, by far, is a positive attitude.” I would suggest that there is no business discipline where this holds more true than in the customer service profession.

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Skills can and must be taught, must be practiced and must constantly be improved. But the nature of things is that the skills required for success are themselves constantly changing as strategies, products, organizations and processes adapt and evolve. Attitudes, on the other hand, cannot be taught at all. With a great deal of effort an individual may cultivate an “attitude adjustment”. Supervisors and organizations can make this kind of adaptation easier or harder but they cannot “train” someone to be empathetic or trusting if it is not their nature.

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Our attitudes produce our behaviors, which in turn produce consequences and results. Organizations who want to be proficient in consistently delighting their customers will seek to hire people with an outlook and attitude of genuine interest in helping people, interacting and solving the customer’s problem (not necessarily the technical one). Hire for attitude and train for aptitude. And see if your customers don’t take notice.

A recent post on Tom Vander Well’s blog entitled “Customer Service Hall of Shame” offered a list of 10 well known companies who, according to an MSN Money/Zogby survey, are well known for delivering memorably poor customer service, and doing so consistently. There are some pretty familiar names on the list, and they offered some pretty familiar excuses their poor performance. Among them were:

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• We’re really big so we’re bound to mess up now and then.
• Yes, but lots of people were pleased with our performance too
• Its just a tough industry and we’re really not doing much worse than everyone else.

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In fact only 1 of the 10 worst companies was willing to acknowledge that it had a real problem with its customer service performance. Several of the comments pointed out that most of these companies had been “making the list” for years and that if they were even making an effort to improve it wasn’t working. How can this be? Surely no company would deliberately ignore the fact that up to half of their customers were very unhappy with them.

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My first job after graduating from business school was at the Ford Motor Company. This was back in the days of the exploding Pinto and even Ford employees joked darkly that the company’s name stood for Found On Road Dead. They were producing poor quality vehicles and even as the Japanese began to take their market away from them nothing seemed to improve. How could this be? Possibly a deadly combination of ignorance and denial. I had the fascinating experience of working at Ford’s World Headquarters in Dearborn, MI. The company executives lived, quite literally, in their own world on the top floor. They arrived at work each day to park in the “executive garage” and ride a private elevator to the executive suites. As they plotted the destiny of Ford, mechanics swarmed over their vehicles making sure they were as perfect as the day they left the factory. I remember vividly the company flying an automotive engineer to NYC to replace the bent license place frame of a member of the Board of Directors. As far as these executives knew their vehicles were perfect, or close to it. They never broke. They never got dirty. They never even had to put gas in the tank. Quality problem? What quality problem?

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It’s natural for people to want to shield executives from bad news, problems and less than perfect performance. If this is successful however, the leaders of the company are in real danger of forming an unrealistic and incorrect perception of how their customers view them. Executives have a responsibility to be in touch with the customer, to understand how their company is perceived from the customer’s perspective. All the more so if the news is not good. Ignorance is not only no excuse, its a recipe for failure. Executive or not, when is the last time you “tried out” your company’s service? If it has been more than a month or two, do it now. The last thing any of us want is to be formulating excuses for ending up on someone’s Hall of Shame list.