Zen and the art of customer service

I’ve been reading Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. First published in 1974, the book has never been out of print, has sold about four million copies to date, and still sells about 100,000 copies a year world-wide.

The book is essentially a gripping and entertaining account of a long motorcycle trip in the United States which the narrator, whom we can reasonably identify with Pirsig himself, makes with his son Chris (Chris rides pillion on Pirsig’s bike) and with a married couple who have their own bike. The account of the trip is interspersed with long, well-articulated and almost always very clearly written and highly accessible philosophical material. Pirsig uses the matter of making sure that his motorbike is well-tuned and well-serviced for the trip – which necessitates important adjustments being made to the bike during the trip – as a metaphor for the need to master technology and use it to one’s maximum benefit. Pirsig sees a sublimity in this mastery of technology. As he puts it:

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself.

Another main theme of the philosophical content of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is Pirsig’s identification of a concept he calls ‘Quality’. He emphasises that this was not a concept he thought of himself but that it was suggested to him by a lady colleague, whose name was Sarah, at the a university college where he taught in the US.

Pirsig does not attempt to define ‘Quality’, and indeed he specifically suggests that it isn’t possible to define it. Pirsig says, in effect, that the precise meaning of quality is something that readers of the book, and people who hear about the philosophy of Quality and set out to make sense of it, need to work out for themselves. Pirsig suggests that Quality is the fundamental force in the universe, stimulating everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of Quality.
One of the endearing things about Pirsig as a philosopher is that while he can talk about things in a highly abstract way, he appears to be at his happiest as a philosopher when he is being down-to-earth. In particular, it’s clear that at its core, Pirsig sees Quality as anything that is really well done, well made, well delivered and well-conceived. As he said in an interview subsequent to the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and referring to the book:

I remember thinking to myself as I wrote it, ‘If this is going to be an essay about Quality you had better not fail to provide an example of it in the writing itself.’

Of course, the importance of quality in products and services was something that had been fully recognised long before Pirsig wrote his book. But what he said that had never been said before is not only that Quality, once attained, becomes a kind of Godhead, but also that it acquires a kind of life, and even life-energy, of its own.

The point, surely, is that this is true of anything that is well-made and well-delivered. The Quality at the heart of the making and the delivery will, indeed, acquire a life of its own that will fill and add sublimity to the lives of people touched by it and will create a kind of multiplier effect of Quality that keeps on resonating positively in the lives of millions and even for years to come. Look, for example, at how a really excellent consumer electronics product wins millions of customers and brings those customers, and people to whom they themselves recommend the products, enormous levels of satisfaction and, yes, sublimity.

Yet no product can ever be truly great without first-rate customer service being delivered with it, and indeed first-rate customer service seems to me beyond doubt to be as valid a manifestation of Quality in terms of Robert Pirsig’s take on the subject as anything else to which the term Quality might be attached.
The point is, when an organisation offers great customer service, it is bringing a sublimity, a very real manifestation of Quality into the world that will delight and enhance the lives not only of the customers who receive Quality in customer service but also the lives of the customer service agents who deliver it.
Let us all, therefore, in our work in customer service, strive for Quality at all times, not only because it makes an organisation more financially successful, but also because great customer service helps to bring sublimity, delight, enhancement – and perhaps even the Godhead – to our lives.