Fire & EMS Leader Pro The job of old firefighters is to teach young firefighters how to become old firefighters!
By: Robert Avsec
Welcome back! Now that you’re here we’ll carry on from where we left off after covering Customer Service Skills 1-5.
#6. Acting Skills
This one “ties in” with #1 (we meet people on one of the worst days…). We may be having a bad day ourselves or this may be the 10th call for the shift…every customer deserves the “happy face”.
(Baseball great, Joe DiMaggio, was once asked after a game in late August—when his New York Yankees team had already wrapped up another American League championship—why he continued to play so hard in a game that was meaningless to the standings. His response? “There’s some kid in the stands who’s seeing me play for the first and last time and he deserves to see my best.”)
Granted, we all encounter folks from time to time…regardless of what we do, we can’t “get them to a better place.” Those situations are where those basic acting skills will come in handy.
#7. Time Management Skills
Our customer service default mode—provided that we have the time—is to spend as much time as necessary to bring about a successful resolution to the problem, right? Almost.
Your patience, listening and attentiveness skills should help clue you into a couple of things:
- Can I clearly understand what the problem is?
- Am I the right person to solve this problem?
- Is the customer going to be receptive to my efforts to solve their problem?
If you’re not able to answer YES to all three of those questions, you’re likely headed into a situation that only winds up wasting your time, their time, or both. When you’re not the person with the solution to their problem, the best customer service you can provide is to find the person who is and bring that person and customer together.
Video: One DeKalb Serves 2013: Scenes of Good Customer Service in DeKalb County
#8. Ability to “Read” Customers
Are you seeing how the skills discussed earlier, e.g., Listening, Attentiveness, etc., are somewhat the 
“foundational skills” that make the subsequent ones possible?
This ability to “read” the customer is more difficult today because many of our interactions are no longer face-to-face. Rather, they take place over the phone or via e-mail, text message or social media, e.g., Twitter, Facebook.
I’m a huge fan and user of all of the above mediums for communication…but I’m very cautious about using them as the conduit to solve a customer service problem. It’s so darn hard to determine someone’s emotional state, their readiness to have dialogue, etc., from only written words. My practice is to use the medium to respond back to the person and obtain a good contact telephone number and the best time to contact them by phone.
#9. A Calming Presence
In most of the customer service situations that we find ourselves in as Fire and EMS professionals, we are subject matter experts. Our challenge is to use that power to not only control the situation, but make it better and that usually results from “reducing the temperature in the room.” (Something we know a thing or two about, right?). This is somewhat related to the skill #5 (Positive Language). Which would you rather hear in response to your very demonstrative complaint:
Officer: Sir, you need to calm down if you want me to help you!
or
Officer: Sir, I’m pretty sure we can find a solution to the problem. How about you and I sit down and see what we can do to figure this out?
Look around you during the course of a day and I think you’ll see that the really good customer service reps know that they cannot let an irate customer force them to lose their cool. Like those folks, it is our job to be a source of strength for one of our customers who believes their world is coming unglued because of this problem today.
#10. Goal Oriented Focus
In the Chesterfield (VA) Fire & EMS Department, from which I retired, our customer service motto was, 
“Do the right thing.” At first glance it look rather ambiguous, no? But in the context provided by our Fire Chief at the time, Steve Elswick, it made perfect sense:
When you take action to help the citizen, ask yourself, “If called upon to do, can I honestly say that I would have done the same for any member of my family?”
Empowering your firefighters and officers to take action is one thing, but it will not necessarily lead to better outcomes or better customer service. That action has to have focus, the focus that comes from having: a clear vision for the organization; a mission statement that provides focus to customer service expectations; and service-oriented goals and objectives for the organization.
Well, we’ve now covered 10 of the 15 desired customer service skills as described by Gregory Ciotti.
15 Customer Service Skills that Every Employee Needs
The third and last installment of this series is already underway, so keep an eye out for it in the next couple of days. Share your thoughts with other readers now that we’ve given 2/3 of the skills some Fire & EMS perspective.
