Using You Is Not Serving You

Two phrases sound almost the same and mean opposite things.

"I'm using you."

"I'm here to serve you."

The first one takes. The second one puts the other person at the center. Nobody says either one out loud, but customers can tell exactly which one is happening.

The tell is intention, not protocol

You can say "my pleasure," smile, use the customer's name three times and follow every best practice on the list. If you're doing it to close the sale and move on, the customer notices.

Not because they're unusually perceptive. Because service collapses at the exact moment serving well stops being convenient: when you have to admit a mistake, when the right product is the cheapest one, when the honest answer is "this isn't for you."

Using you means chasing what's mine through you. Serving you means chasing what's yours, even if it pays off for me later.

Why the word "serving" lost its dignity

We live in a culture where serving isn't always respected. The server is seen as beneath the served, and service as something you endure rather than something you choose.

That's where defensive teams come from, and companies that treat service as a cost, and people who apologize for working with customers.

The deeper problem: if serving is humiliating, nobody will do it well. They'll follow the script, hit the metric, and stop there.

Serving pays you back

Serving well isn't sacrifice. It returns trust, results and meaning to the person doing it. In my experience, the people who enjoy customer-facing work the most are the ones who realized they were solving something that mattered to someone.

That's when service stops being a burden and becomes a path.

Three questions for you and your team

• What do I get from serving this person well? If the only answer is "the sale," something is missing.
• What does this person need that they haven't asked for yet?
• Would I be willing to tell them something they don't want to hear if it helps them?

A team that can answer those three questions doesn't need a smiling manual.

Where this comes from

This idea opens the first chapter of *Estoy para servirte*, my book about service as a mission rather than a job title.