One of the things I have been obsessing about recently is customer care.

I’m more conscious about the level of caring I receive from service providers.

When I’m at the Gautrain station, I observe the level of caring by the cashier at the ticket office, when I use Uber, I observe the level of caring by the driver, when I’m a restaurant, bookshop, wherever there is a business transaction, I always ask myself, does this person serving me really care?

To be great at customer care, you have to actually care. You have to actually give a damn.

Behavioural strategies designed to demonstrate care which have become increasingly popular are important but not enough.

No matter how many training courses or conferences you attend, there is no way around the stubborn truth that real care begins only with real caring.

The thing is we can tell whether the person serving us is really caring and heart-felt or if their care is manufactured and fake.

You can’t fake caring. Try as you might, you can’t hide the truth.

It is not enough to modify people’s behaviours, the change that is most needed is the change on how we see. How we see others, ourselves, and our obligations relative to one another.

This realm of how we see is what I call the sawubona mindset.

What I have learned since spending time observing customer care, is that it is not enough to just try change people’s behaviours, we have to strive to change their mindset.

It is not enough to just attend a customer care course, you really have to care.

Caring about a person because of a particular title they hold is not really caring about that person, it is caring about their title.

Efforts to change mindset and behaviour will yield better results than efforts to change just the behaviour alone.