Cast your mind back to last week and recount the many moments you exchanged with a member of staff who served you. Was there one that stood out? Chances are, if anything comes to mind, it’s because it was remarkably good or remarkably bad. The rest blur into the beige wallpaper of an ordinary week.
I’ve just returned from the ARC Conference in London – the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a three-day gathering of over two hundred voices from academia, philosophy, politics, business, technology and the arts, held under the theme “The Age of Reconstruction.” The premise: confidence in our civilisational story has been eroding, and the work ahead is to rebuild it – our heritage, our social fabric, our institutions – deliberately and with conviction.
The key takeaway I’ve come home with: we need to fight for the values and virtues of the country we want to live in. Not as an abstract conversation for politicians and panels, but as something we get ruthlessly clear about in the ordinary moments of every single day. We need to demand of our corporations how they recruit, train and promote people by living the values of what this country actually stands for.
What might those values be, you ask? There lies the question. Right now, our confused, mixed-up, messed-up nation would struggle to answer it. Through my own lens; grounded in faith, a citizen proud of her nation, a business owner building jobs and economic value, someone who sees service as an act of leadership; I’d say we start with truth, excellence, discipline and dignity.
And then I’d ask: where do we actually see those values show up? Not in mission statements. In moments.
In my book, The Future of Service is 5D, I describe an entirely ordinary day: a family member’s medical appointment, a flight, a hotel check-in, some personal shopping, dinner with colleagues, a supermarket stop on the way home. Six human exchanges, and not one was rude, hostile or openly offensive. That’s the trap; we measure service by the absence of bad behaviour rather than the presence of good values.
The receptionist checked us in efficiently and said nothing more. The airline staff member processed my bag without eye contact, without a word. The hotel clerk handed over a key with a half-smile and zero curiosity about who I actually was. In the retail store, a simple product question was met with a look of disapproval, enough that I walked out without buying anything. At dinner, we waited, ordered from a QR code, ate a meal “dumped and run,” and were handed a tipping machine with nobody attached to it. By the supermarket, even I had stopped paying attention.
Nobody did anything wrong. And that’s precisely the problem.
This isn’t a training problem, a script problem, or a technology problem, though we love to blame all three. It’s a values problem wearing a customer service costume. When excellence, discipline, truth and dignity aren’t named as values a business hires for, you get exactly what I’ve described: competent transactions completed by disengaged humans, none of whom were shown, modelled or expected to bring more of themselves to the exchange.
Service is not a department. It’s not a smile trained into place or a metric to be managed. Service is the highest act of contribution one human can make to another, because to serve is to see, to listen, to care enough to act. When that’s missing at scale, across a whole community, in queue after queue, it’s not a coincidence. It’s culture, made visible or in this case, made absent.
If we want a different country, a different community, a different standard of how we treat one another, we have to demand it in the ordinary moments, not just the extraordinary ones. We have to ask what we are recruiting for, training for and promoting for. The truth is simple: every underwhelming interaction is a small referendum on what we, as a community, have decided to tolerate.
It’s time we stopped tolerating beige.
If beige service has become the standard in your organisation, it is time to reset what good looks like. Visit the ServiceQ website to find out how we help leaders build service cultures where excellence, discipline, dignity and care show up in the everyday moments that matter.
And if this struck a chord, forward it to a leader who is shaping the next generation of employees. The future of service will be determined by what we choose to teach, model and reinforce today.