The ethnography of customer service

The place I work in (a military hospital) is making a concerted effort to improve the overall customer service in the facility. This effort is especially aimed at the civilian workforce who interact with the public daily, ie. receptionists, physician assistants, nurses, etc. The impression I get is that while the average level of customer service is pretty good, there are some areas that are particularly dismal AND this is coupled with a difficult (read sick people) customer base that is especially likely to complain (most people don’t like to fool around with their healthcare, so I can’t blame them).
The training module they have selected is based around a scripted model where you have a more or less standard group of things you say in each given interaction with a customer. I’m not going to give my opinion (unflattering) of the chosen model but instead pose the point that perhaps the reason that some of the employees around here give such poor customer service is that they have never had good customer service modeled for them. Or at least not often enough for the light to dawn. The average level of interaction with service personnel in this part of the world is pretty darn dismal. This has been brought into particularly sharp relief coming back from a vacation where almost everyone bent over backwards to make sure we had a good experience. This is an increasingly rare commodity and difficult to perfect without lots of practice and reinforcement (and a sincere desire to be polite and helpful). Maybe sending the troublemakers to a 5 star hotel or resort for a seminar and directing them to take notes and learn from the example would be more effective in the long run than hours of generalized training that insults and bores the effective people and misses completely the people it’s aimed at. There is no easy way to teach empathy and understanding.