Ensuring Your Customer Service Initiative Will Be Successful: The Third Key

In pre­vi­ous parts of this series I’ve touched on the impor­tance of man­ager INTENT and how under­stand­ing and act­ing from intent will inspire your team. And I’ve talked about the impact of empow­er­ing your teams and ways to enable them.

The next key ele­ment – one that if imple­mented will ensure your strat­egy takes hold and flour­ishes – is to pro­vide “proper training.”

I recently came across an inter­est­ing post from Ben Horowitz who is cur­rently a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist but wrote the arti­cle, “Why it’s Cru­cial to Train Your Employ­ees” from the per­spec­tive of being the for­mer Direc­tor of Prod­uct Man­age­ment at Netscape. The arti­cle includes a quote from Andy Grove, for­mer CEO of Intel, from his book “High Out­put Management.”

Although I might have added a “her­self” in there, the point is that man­agers have a lot to share and a lot rid­ing on the suc­cess of their teams so they should invest time train­ing their people.

Three impor­tant points were made in the article….

One of the things he pointed out, and I agree with whole heart­edly, is that if you don’t train your peo­ple, you have no basis for man­ag­ing their per­for­mance.

Hir­ing for cus­tomer ser­vice atti­tude is impor­tant but when it comes to cus­tomer ser­vice skills and, in par­tic­u­lar, any skills nec­es­sary to imple­ment your cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy – you bet­ter lay out your expec­ta­tions and train your team for the job.

Pro­vid­ing good, job spe­cific train­ing that sup­ports your cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy not only gives every­one a com­mon ser­vice vocab­u­lary and lets every­one prac­tice that which is required,  it also helps retain talent.

At Netscape, for exam­ple, Mr. Horowitz found that one of the two pri­mary rea­sons peo­ple quit the com­pany was “They weren’t learn­ing any­thing – the com­pany wasn’t invest­ing in the employees.”

Job train­ing is an impor­tant part of any employee reten­tion program.

Employ­ees notice when their com­pany makes an effort to give them some­thing that’s going to help them do their jobs bet­ter. They notice any sort of atten­tion and most respond with increased effort and enthu­si­asm. If they don’t, well, they may not be a good fit for the job.

The last point I took from the article—one that sup­ports this key ele­ment for imple­ment­ing a suc­cess­ful, last­ing cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy – was  to pro­vide proper train­ing or beware the mess you may have on your hands if you don’t.

Let me explain what I mean with an exam­ple. I was just talk­ing with a hi-tech client who bemoaned the chal­lenges that come with rapid growth. She wasn’t unhappy with the growth, just the headaches that came with it. The Horowitz arti­cle men­tioned the same thing. New engi­neers are some­times hired and set loose to fix bugs and write new code with­out any­one tak­ing time to let them know how code has been writ­ten in the past or the whys and where­fores of the archi­tec­ture – which leads to (and I quote) “incon­sis­ten­cies in the user expe­ri­ence, per­for­mance prob­lems, and a gen­eral mess.”

The same thing can hap­pen with ser­vice skills. We all know that the floor cre­ates its own rules if left in a vac­uum. Cre­ativ­ity reigns but it can be a mess  with incon­sis­ten­cies in the way things are han­dled and even the infor­ma­tion that’s given to customers.

For me, proper train­ing means that the train­ing fits the ini­tia­tive or job to be done and pre­pares the trainee in a mean­ing­ful way to do his or her job bet­ter than before the training.

At Impact proper train­ing trans­lates to “prac­tice, prac­tice, prac­tice” espe­cially if com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills are involved. Don’t tell me what you’d do, let me hear what you’d say. Talk to me. Role play with me. I can hear the groans from those of you who would rather visit the den­tist than role play but, let’s face it, it is the sin­gle best and safest way to build con­fi­dence.  And, yes, I’m talk­ing about mon­i­tored prac­tice  fol­lowed by imme­di­ate feed­back not just get­ting into tri­ads to role play and using old inef­fec­tive (but totally comfy) habits. The idea is to build con­scious competence.

But there are other cre­ative ways to deliver results that don’t always involve eLearn­ing or a classroom.

For exam­ple, for a cus­tomer ser­vice ini­tia­tive aimed at show­ing cus­tomers you care, which approach do you think might be a more fit­ting and mean­ing­ful activ­ity for the team—to really get them ready to show they want to help cus­tomers? A ded­i­cated trainer like the one here on the left who is ready and able to explain what to do and why it’s impor­tant using great hand­outs and really inter­est­ing Pow­er­Point slides?  Or an assign­ment like the one pic­tured on the right that chal­lenges reps to go out and do ran­dom acts of kind­ness… like car­ry­ing gro­ceries for some­one or donat­ing cloth­ing to a shel­ter or serv­ing a meal at a soup kitchen.

This activ­ity, by the way, was some­thing a call cen­ter in Canada did as part of their new hire train­ing. It report­edly not only had an incred­i­ble impact on the reps but it also had a very pos­i­tive effect on the company’s rep­u­ta­tion in the com­mu­nity. To learn more about this idea, check out my blog post on the secret value of unortho­dox cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing at Impact’s blog.

The third key ele­ment that has to be in place in order to ensure suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion of your cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy is to “pro­vide proper train­ing” – train­ing that let’s your staff know what you want, what you don’t want, how to do it, and gives ample prac­tice to build confidence.

Here are some ques­tions to consider:

• What does a rep need to be able to DO to sup­port your cus­tomer ser­vice strategy?
• What does he or she need to KNOW?
• Does your train­ing address those two things?
• What can be done dif­fer­ently to make it even more relevant?

MONITORING and GIVING FEEDBACK is the fourth key ele­ment and I’ll talk about best prac­tices in the next part of this series.