The Salute

At one time or another, you've probably seen a movie or show where a fighter pilot takes off from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

Part of the ritual is that just before the pilot gets flung off the deck, he is given and returns a smart salute from the deck boss. It's the ultimate sign of respect.

I'm on the way to Vancouver (from Seattle) on a small puddle jumper. We go down the ramp to the plane and have to stop while another small plane is getting ready to leave.

As the plane was just rolling away, the young women marshalling the plane gave the little United Airlines plane a very smart salute. I looked up into the plane to see the pilot (co-pilot, actually) return it with the same snappy respect.

IAs I watched this exchange of less then 30 seconds, I wondered about what you would do if you 'saluted' your customer. A smart, snappy salute.

Would they return the gesture of the single finger type? Laugh? Roll thy eyes?

Or would they feel/sense the respect and return some respect your way?

Mutual respect, not a bad thing to think about.

Comments

[Daniel Nerezov]

good point

[Walter Lounsbery]

Over ten years ago I worked in the IT department of a large national retailer headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. There were many cultural problems in that department. Perhaps it was all summarized in the semi-official "company salute", an exagerrated shrug.

I think I prefer the snappy salute!

[J. Shirley]

Walter,
Could be worse... I was at a company where they had this measureable benchmark of what I can only describe as "personal gratitude". If an outside party came in,they would ask what was the most memorable and if they said something other than, "The staff here is remarkably friendly" we would be asked what went wrong.

Meetings were ended by thank you's extended to every person present, by every person present.. 15 thank you's for a 15 minute meeting.

Fun times.

[Tom Gordon]

The concept of treating customers with respect is one that is prevalent in any form of 'community management' - by ensuring your customers feel like they are being treated individually rather than just as part of the herd, your customers become happier.

And it works. In one extreme example (a moderated SMS text-to-screen service a few years back on UK satellite TV), when we took over the moderation duties we introduced 'real people' who interacted with the people using the service, and actually treated them like real people (as well as customers).

Given that the number of messages was actually quantifiable (every incoming message was a cellphone SMS, so everything was tracked), we could do some statistical analysis on the number of messages.

Before: 1,000 incoming messages per week.
After (6 weeks of treating customers with respect): 14,000 messages per week.

If you treat your customers with respect, they will come back - even if they can get the same service cheaper elsewhere.