Customer Service Speaker Asks, Should Customer Service Professionals Cultivate A Bedside Manner?

A very slick Hollywood movie from a few years ago customer service professionals with a fascinating scene.

In a hospital a bedridden woman is moaning loudly, casting expletives at everyone in sight. Obviously in excruciating pain from a badly broken leg, her husband asked the seasoned nurse whether such loud and abusive verbal eruptions are “normal.”

“Perfectly normal,” the nurse replies in a knowing and serene tone, girded by a New Englander’s steadiness. “The bone marrow seeps into the blood” she explained, and sufferers could be expected to not at all sound or behave like themselves.

This scene is an emblem of what I believe health care and customer care should be. The nurse was knowledgeable, calm, empathic, clear, and steady, even as the harried husband and his anguished wife were nearly careening out of control.

I’ve often wondered, why aren’t more customer service people, especially in businesses, like that nurse, who went on to soothingly repeat the salve, “It will pass.”

A few reasons come to mind:

(1) Senior, professional nurses are perceived as the treasures they are. Great effort is invested in many of the best hospitals to retain these practitioners and to have them mentor less experienced staffers. Comparatively, customer service ranks experience much more employee turnover and a lack of consistency in training and development.

(2) Nurses and doctors consciously deal with people in pain, and understand as helping professionals it is their job to work through and despite the challenges and distractions pain presents. Customer service people believe that conflict-one of pain’s manifestations– is unusual and something to be avoided or suppressed. Instead of dealing with it as if it is normal, they tend to perceive it as a threat and often they interpret negative communications from customers as being personal attacks.

(3) Medical professionals, even the steeliest among them, are aware of the ideal practitioner, who is not only technically competent, but also a source of warmth and comfort in distressing circumstances. The “bedside manner” that is a role-goal in medicine has no equivalent in business. I’ve never heard of a CSR that seeks to cultivate a “phone-side manner,” unless of course they come from a health care setting.

Turn on your TV and you’ll see heroic health professionals performing life-saving activities in numerous shows. But when customer service cubicles are shown in the media, their occupants are often satirized and trivialized.

Perhaps those of us in customer service and customer satisfaction should pay more attention to colleagues in kindred fields, not only for behavioral tips, but also for occasional inspiration.