This summer, I holidayed to Turkey, as the nights draw in and heating comes back on, I think back to relaxing in the sunshine, overlooking the Aegean Sea, surrounded by striking mountains… this time with a professional head One thing that often strikes a chord with me is Customer Service, often when abroad I think back to the UK and frown at the distinctly mediocre service levels that we accept. In Turkey, one of the newer ‘hot destinations’ for UK travellers, the level of service received in almost every aspect of my holiday was pretty much first class. I began to draw some comparisons with UK 1) Service received The service received in restaurants for example, pretty much first class in every respect regardless of the quality of restaurant we chose to dine in! For the equivalent money here in the UK I would received basic customer service at best. For comparable service in this country I estimated I would need to spend 2-3 times more 2) The people Most of the workers in the Turkish resort came for the larger cities such as Istanbul, most with families, or if local, are working as complete family. As a rule, everyone was welcoming and warm towards there visitors, with the exception of some market sellers. The rule in Turkey seemed to be, if you were spending money you were treated like a king (or queen), and of course, we all know that the customer is king (or queen) 3) The language If you had two individuals, one had the same mother tongue to yourself, one as a second language. It is immediately more difficult for speakers of other languages to communicate effectively. This does perhaps, go a long way to support the notion that communication is not in the words you say but the tonality and non-verbal language that you use. In summary, why do we get treated so well in comparison to this country? The answer is simple, because they want to treat you in that way… If I analysed the actual language used by our Turkish counterparts, it would fall well short of the language used in our customer service environments (they haven’t been through the ‘Customer Service for Idiots’ training course). BUT, this didn’t matter; we are gripped by the tonality and warm body language which the UK will never match. The reason it will never be matched is that, generally speaking, our customer service community will never come to work with that desire to delight and help the customer, but merely to read form the script And so, we continue to accept mediocrity…