I have been conducting service training courses throughout Thailand in hotels, hospitals, education institutions and retail businesses for many years. Often, I have received questions from management and owners of how to make employees have more service mind, how to make staff have better behavior in servicing guests or how to make people be able to deliver excellent service.

My answers have never been short, however, in brief, I wish to say that service excellence could be proceeded with a well-thought through procedure, excellent implementation and effective monitoring and follow up.

In this article, I like to touch first on "service mind" and "service behavior" for a clear and better understanding, because they are the core of service foundation.

I believe some people are born to be service minded and many people are trained to be. For the "born to be" ones, these people just like to serve, to help, to make others feel comfortable and they will be very happy when others are happy. They are the people who have "mind" to "service", that’s why they are "service minded people". This type of service is purely from a good heart. However, the people who have a mind to service may not always come with the "right behavior".

"Service behavior" is the right and relevant behavior in the field. Many people do not have good behavior because they lack of life practice in their manner and lack of experience. Therefore, training is very important to make people understand what kind of "service behaviors" are expected for guests. Most of people who have" service mind" have no problem to accept the right "service behavior". However, some of the service minded people are not that fast in adapting the behaviors that are expected in this generation. Let’s take a hospital as an example! We all know that hospitals right now would like to be more international and want to upgrade their services, so good "service behaviors" are demandingly expected especially from many high profile patients.

As mentioned above, I have conducted service training course for many hospitals. Many staff and nurses love to help patient, but they may not really speak nicely, and some of their manners are not good at all. They are truly there to help, but not be there to give good service. From my active training research, many people in most hospitals believe that "help and service" are separated. So, by training nursing people, I have to focus on making them understand that - to truly help a patient, their service must be a kind of spiritual service. I mean that the service must come with the right behavior because the right behavior has a great impact to the patient’s mind, comfort and confidence.

In a short conclusion: To train people to be "service minded", the trainer must be very sharp and use spiritual motivation techniques and also to emphasize at all times that the training is for their own development first. Because if the staff are not good, no way that the organization is going to be good. With positive and motivating training sessions, employees may gradually start to change and become more a "service minded" person. Repetitive behaviors will change people minds in most cases.

Finally, I like to add the important thing that; most staff are very motivated and wishes to service with the right behavior after the training session. But do you know the reason why many employees lose their motivation to behave rightly day after day or even hour by hour.

I will tell you here: We train staff how to greet guest properly with smile and treat people with respect. But their management hardly smiles and almost never greets staff first! Many times management not even responds to employees greeting. Moreover, most of the times, management never treat employees with respect. So, if the managers cannot or/ and are not willing to do, how the managers expect their staff to consistently do it. This fact is always the "number one" service failure at most companies I know. It is so easy for managers to watch other and comment others! Why the managers never think what the staff wants out of them; actually all staff want a role model, want spiritual support from their managers. That means managers must be a good example, not just a good commentator.

In my next article, I will start giving the reader bit by bit idea of how to achieve service excellence in an organization.