Leverage the sense of service culture

Leverage the sense of service culture

How we can leverage the sense of service culture to people surround us?

I had a unique story. Back in 1997-2002, I used to be an account manager for incumbent IT Company, which also “Stated own Company” or “half of Bureaucrats Company”.

I’ve tried to repositioning myself as a “new generation IT professional Account Manager”, but need many efforts to change the perception (and on that time, it seemed impossible 🙂 ).

Most of my clients are Hotel industries, which are very sensitive to services. I learn how to managing service and how to deliver good service to their customers from them. It was a great lesson experiences and free service culture benchmark for me.

Beside all those advantages and positive points that I learned, I also faced tough challenges. I replaced my previous account manager which had service culture as the IT Company had. He was inflexible, rigid and bureaucrat style. It was really a big challenge for me.

Every time I visited my clients, the 1st thing I used to do was always checking their public phone facilities before meet any of my clients (contact persons). It became my habit and standard procedure. I implement the same procedure to every hotel that I managed.

Well, The Duty Manager and The Front Office manager of a 5 stars hotel seemed to notice my “unusual public phone checking habit”. And when they had their Morning Briefing/ Meeting with the GM, they said to the audience that the new “IT Account Manager” always checks their IT Facility, so they felt secured and felt was handling by “the right person“.

After that meeting, I got their trust and easily building rapport with them. I became easy to meet with every contact person from every department at that hotels (Finance, Engineering, IT, Front Office, Marketing, etc). The issues of “a new generation IT account manager” was spreading to other hotels thru their own department inter hotel community (Front Office Hotel Community). I easily became close to hotel industry and still have long good term relationship with them until now.

Sometimes, little things make big difference, and how we use our simple leverage to make a better situation.