The Customer is King. So what is the Service Provider?

Does “the customer is king” make the service provider only a servant? Or as the Latin root would indicate, a slave?

Not according to our definition of service: “Service is taking action to create value for someone else.”

In this definition, what creates the value? It is the action taken. And who gets the value? It is someone else.

Which means the person taking the action must understand what someone else wants, needs, hopes for, or cares about, and then must choose the right actions – and take the right actions – to create that new or added value.

Then the real SOURCE OF VALUE is not in the action taken. The SOURCE OF VALUE is the person choosing and who takes action, and that is service provider.

So, the customer may be king, but the service provider is source of value for the king, and the queen, and the customer, the client, and the colleague.

And that makes the service provider the most valuable position of all.