That's right - you heard me. If you want a truly effective customer service organization, ideally, you should not base any portion of your hiring or training on the your (potential) employees' manners.
Now, in order to get you to drink my Kool-Aid, you need to understand and agree with my definition of manners. For the purposes of this post, we're going to consider definition 2b of Dictionary.com, which I believe is the most applicable definition to the customer service environment: "ways of behaving with reference to polite standards; social comportment."
(Definition 3 applies pretty well too.)
Some quick background: two days ago, I had the pleasure of missing a connection flight in Atlanta Int. airport in transit from Ft. Lauderdale to home. What ordinarily would have been a 45 minute lay-over turned into a three hour wait. No problem - my wife and I were coming back from a little cruise R&R, and we weren't in a rush to get home for any reason. However, our extended stay in Atlanta meant getting some dinner, a book, a travel pillow for my wife, that sort of stuff. During those three hours, I noticed something very interesting. The people working various stations in the airport had no manners whatsoever! They never smiled. I never once heard a single "thank you" or "your welcome," even in response to such courtesies extended by customers.
At first, this bugged me a bit, but very quickly it dawned on me that the employees I observed had traded in manners/courtesy for honestly. They weren't thankful, and so offering a "thank you" to a customer would be a hollow, insincere sentiment at best. I'm guessing most people would be put off by the lack of manners, but I came to understand it and even respect it.
Here's what I decided: manners are an excuse to pretend you care. An employee in a customer service role can only pretend to care for so long. Once they stop caring, a predictable and costly cycle plays out - dropoff in production, firing, search for new applicants, and new training for your new, "well mannered" employees.
Does that mean you should employ rude people? Of course not. I'm not suggesting the behavior displayed by the airport staff was proper. I'm suggesting they hired the wrong people.
Instead of hiring people who display good manners, look for people who are genuinely gracious, where words of kindness and gestures of pleasantry are not motivated by a need to pretend, but by the innate character of the individuals who extend them. The overt result (at least in the beginning) might look identical - the differences between good manners and genuine caring might be very subtle, but in the long run, you'll cultivate a more positive, more efficient work environment for your employees, with results your customers will notice in a very good way. Customer loyalty goes up, costs associated with maintaining a workforce (large or small) go down. Bottom line - everyone wins! Manners are an excuse to lie and falsely represent the character of your company. Genuine caring is simply...genuine.
I'm sorry, are you asking how to tell the difference between manners and caring when interviewing potential customer service representatives? How should I know? C'mon now - I can't solve all of the world's problems for ya :)
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That's it in a nutshell Steve. There are people who love taking care of others, in any capacity. There are people out there who love nothing more than the feeling of satisfaction that comes from making someone else's day through the caring attention to their needs.
My wife is one of those people. She's a nurse. If she didn't genuinely care about the welfare of her customers, she and her patients would be miserable. I know true compassion for other exists because I see it every day. Recognizing it during a hiring process is a bit more challenging.