Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

We are in the financial service industry, right? All of your organizations, your businesses, you serve somebody. SWIFT is a membership organization that serves all of you. We all live and work in a world of service which raises a very interesting question. What do we mean by that?

Now Lauren said the book was called uplifting services, no it’s called uplifting service. What does it mean? That’s okay, no problem. In other words, the services, we also want to provide those services, with good service. But what does service mean? Now of course you should have a good definition. You’ve been in the industry for years, you’re a professional, you know how to give somebody a great experience. So what is your definition of service?

When I say go you’re gonna turn to your partner and you’re gonna tell them your definition. At the same time that they’re telling you, there’s. So it will go like this.. SERVICE IS.. and you tell them. Now why at the same time? Because I want you to speak and listen to see whether or not what you say to each other even sounds like the same thing. Ready?

Take a deep breath, turn to your partner and go. Service is…How many of you found that you and your partner said to each other exactly the same words? Yeah, but that’s strange when one of you raises their hand and the other one goes “no, no, not really”. Yeah, and you know what, sometimes people, even professionals in a services industry have very shallow definitions, like make the customer happy. Yeah well, what if cyber security says ‘no, no we’re not supposed to do that for you. right? Or give the customer whatever they want. Bad idea sometimes or how about this, ‘serve other people the way you would like to be served’ which assumes that everybody else on the planet is just like you. Fortunately, they’re not. They’re like them, which means that service has got to be something that’s not about what we think it’s for somebody else. 

Now when I came to Singapore thirty years ago, I realized that there wasn’t a really good solid definition of service that could be applied across the board. Internal service as well as external service, senior-level board of directors service, frontline call centre service. So we worked on it and came up with a definition. It goes like this. Please read it with me, ready, go. ‘Service is taking action’ does that make sense? You got to do something for us to call it service. Now what you do maybe with a keyboard it may be over the phone it could be a document, right? But you’ve got to take some action. Now, what’s the purpose of the action?

To do something that someone else will want, need, appreciate, benefit from, hope for, pay for. Something that someone else will value. Please read it with me again. Ready, go. Service is taking action to create value for someone else. Does this definition make sense? Does it sound like actually you know that’s what we do every day? Lots of times people say what we do every day is, we follow these procedures, we do this process, we meet this KPI. But what’s the purpose of all that? Talk to your partner real quick. Does this definition apply to the work that you do? Ready, go!