I just finished a conversation with a leader in a top rated US hospital about creating a Customer Service culture. We both marveled at the comments she had received from her organization recently suggesting that customer service is so simple, why would their organization even need to teach it?!

Is customer service simple? Maybe. Is it easy to achieve consistently in most organizations? Definitely not. Most of us can recall countless examples where we personally witnessed (or were victims of) horrendous customer service failures.

So what is the solution? The problem, at least partially, may stem from our solution- orientation. We actually think we can fix this, and it will stay fixed. Customer service, however, is a moving target and we need to be working at it regularly. The more intentional we are about keeping service in the forefront of our organization, the greater the chances of providing consistently excellent service.

That of course is true, if we also pay attention to what Dave Erdman, President of Vital Learning Corporation, refers to as