When Randall Woodfin was 15 years old, he worked at a supermarket bagging groceries.
“I was classically trained in customer service,” he says, only half-jokingly. He went on to Morehouse College (alongside PA State Senator Sharif Street) and Samford University School of Law before working as an attorney for the city of Birmingham for eight years. But his early lessons in putting customers first never left him.
In fact, when he was elected mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, in 2017, his first order of business was to create five core values for his administration—and the first is customer service. There’s also transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, but they all start with customer service, in which every city employee now gets trained (and, in the spirit of the other values, reviewed).
“I think city government has to move to a point where if and when people have an issue, if they have to call 311, 911—if there is a pothole, if we missed picking up their trash, whatever the issue is—we have to be in a position as city employees on the frontline making sure we address the issue,” Woodfin said during a virtual chat with Citizen co-founder Larry Platt on Wednesday night. “And how we address that issue, how we listen, how we talk to them, is very important as well. And customer service is the backbone and foundation of government and how we should deliver services, period.”
That guiding philosophy was just one among many refreshing approaches Woodfin shared with the crowd via Zoom. Below, a few more.