Customer Service – The Customer’s Responsibility????

A friend of mine took her two young boys to Paris for Spring Break this year.  Must be nice! So how was the trip?  Great except for the last leg of their flight home.

“Our flight from Philadephia was cancelled and here I was in an airport, wanting to get home and trying to entertain my boys,” she told me. 

We’ve all been there at one time or another.  We know the frustration of having to put Plan B into place.  So what did she do?

“I figured that if I wanted to get my kids on a flight home I needed to be as nice as possible to the agent.  I needed to kill them with kindness.” 

Wait – who is the customer service representative?  The customer???

“It worked,” she told me.  “I smiled and told her how grateful I was that she was doing her job and what a challenging position she had and how I admired her and pretty soon she found us three seats on a flight home.”

Oh.  My.  Gosh.

“You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” she reminded me.  “So I just piled on the sugar.  That’s how you get good customer service – you schmooze the employee.”

Just how twisted a world are we living in that to get good customer service from a company the CUSTOMER has to provide it?  Am I crazy or does this seem backward?