Teachers love to teach. They love their students and spend long hours preparing lessons and grading papers for the reward of a few minutes of face time with them each day. They get giddy when those teachable moments emerge and rejoice that their hard work has paid off when a student finally “gets it.”
Teachers also love their subjects. Like introducing their friends who have never met each other, teachers relish in the opportunity to introduce their students to their favorite authors, ideas, and historical events. Teachers enjoy studying their subject matter, not only for the sheer pleasure of the subject itself but to grow in knowledge and understanding so they can be better teachers.
Like most vocations, however, teachers also have additional responsibilities that are intrinsic to successful teaching. In other words, teachers wear many hats. Though it’s usually not intentional, teachers can easily neglect those other hats, especially those that are intuited–caught rather than taught.
For example, teachers sometimes wear the hat of customer service agent for their school. Because teachers are the face of the school on the day-to-day basis, they are often a point of contact for parents and students who need additional guidance about an issue or help with a matter they are struggling with. To be a successful teacher, one must also be a good customer service agent. A teacher who is not aware parents and students (his customers) see him wearing this hat can easily slip into the role of a bad customer service agent without even realizing it.
Like the acrid smell of bad fish, a bad customer service experience lingers long after you’ve thrown out the spoil and cleaned up the mess.
Imagine your own worst customer service experience and the bad taste it left in your mouth. Perhaps you were overcharged, purchased faulty merchandise, or received bad service of some kind. You know what a hassle and inconvenience it is trying to advocate for yourself to set things right.
A bad customer service experience is almost always a reactive experience. This is where the disappointed or defrauded customer has to do the hard work of calling or emailing—often spending valuable time tracking down the right person they need to talk to—about their issue. Then they have to advocate for their situation until a remedy is achieved, which is almost always substandard of their expectation. Like the acrid smell of bad fish, a bad customer service experience lingers long after you’ve thrown out the spoil and cleaned up the mess.
A good customer service experience, on the other hand, is one where the agent advocates for the customer and goes out of his way to help solve the customer’s issue. A better experience is where the agent makes it worth the customer’s while for having been inconvenienced. And yet, the best customer service experience is the proactive one–where the business anticipates issues and fixes them before the customer faces unnecessary frustration, inconvenience, or disappointment.
A good teacher wears his customer service hat joyfully and strives to be the kind of agent he would like to deal with if he had to do the hard work of calling when something wasn’t right (Matthew 7:12).
A better teacher will go the extra mile for his customers and make the experience of addressing the problem worth their while (Matthew 5:41).
It’s the best teachers, though, who proactively anticipate issues that might stink up the classroom and fix the situation before there’s a mess that needs to be cleaned up (Proverbs 14:15 cf. 27:12).
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