Customer: “Why don’t you just do it this way, and it will take care of situation.”

Customer Service Person: “I understand what you are saying, but we can to do it this way.”

Then situation magically goes downhill from there and it is difficult to win back customer.

What Happened?

The customer service person used one word that has a powerful negative effect when dealing with customers. The one word, if you can imagine, brings out horns on customer’s forehead, turns his face red, tightens his teeth, and clinches his hands…the word is but.

This is because but is an exclusive word. The use of but negates everything that was said previously by customer. The customer then feels alienated and disrespected. It says to customer, “You discounted or ignored everything I just said and you are going on with your agenda. Well, you don’t respect me, so I won’t respect your solution.”

The Solution

Brought up in an era with a cliché that went: ‘You must work hard for a living’ my attitude to work conflicted with what I’d learned from my elders and peers. I felt ‘wrong’ because I wanted to be lazy. I felt ‘guilty’ for wanting to do as little as possible and ‘unworthy’ in my role as office manager for an insurance brokerage. But I tell you I’ve cracked it! I’ve discovered how to maximize my results without working like a dog.

When I tell you how easy this is, you might not believe me. When I tell you how easy this is you’ll probably think that idea is so alien to your ‘work hard for a living’ ethics that you won’t want to believe me, so before I share my secret to success with you, let me first tell you something worth bearing in mind…

Every day doctors prescribe more and more anti-depressants, Every month more and more couples separate or divorce; and Every year more and more employees take time off work because of one stress disorder or another.

We work too long… we work too hard… we get tired… we get stressed… and we die too young.

So my first secret of success is this: if your work hurts you or depresses you then it is killing you. And I’m willing to put money on it that you’ll find yourself much less effective as a dead person. But you know that there is something inside of you that makes you feel good, something that excites you, something that will bring you life if only you discover how to get to it.

Some people have heart attacks or get cancer with stress of overwork. It’s a pretty rude awakening. Some people review life when they find out they might die soon. My wake up call for working too hard was a fourteen-foot fall, head first onto concrete. The impact hurt…naturally! But more importantly it knocked enough sense into my skull to make me realise how precious life is and served as a reminder that I really needed to get back to creating that system of not working too hard.