Many managers and leaders, business owners and CEO’s don’t believe that consistent and ongoing customer service training is crucial to ensuring customer satisfaction. They believe that placing an employee in a role and paying them is all that is required for employees to provide a superior level of customer service. This is a huge mistake – one that could cause any company to be plagued with customer service issues. Customer satisfaction leads to customer loyalty. Loyal customers support businesses consistently and this impacts your company’s bottom line.
Customer Service Training is paramount to the success of any business. Customers’ expectations and demands are constantly changing. What satisfies customers today could very well be antiquated in a few months and ongoing customer service training helps to keep employees abreast of these changes. In addition, a quarterly refresher course on the basics of customer service helps any organization. This provides employees with the opportunity to be reminded of the courtesies that should be extended to every customer. Let’s face it, sometimes employees adapt to the routineness of their job functions and lose touch with the service aspect. Common courtesies are forgotten and customers are provided with a substandard or an average service experience.
Customer Service Training should not be optional – not if your organization is looking to build a strong customer base and create customer loyalty. Customer facing employees represent the business to the customer and not every employee will understand or consider how their service or lack of service affects your bottom line. What impression do you want your customers to walk away with after an encounter with one of your employees? Do you want the customer to remember your company’s brand as professional, caring and service oriented? Have you trained your employees on your company’s vision? Why are you in business? What are your goals? How can employees help and what’s in it for them? Have your trained your employees to understand and deliver on the various aspects of service recovery? Have you trained them to ask and gently probe for information to ensure they are meeting the customer’s needs? Have you trained them to anticipate the needs of their customers? Have you provided them with sufficient product knowledge training? Do they know how to proficiently upsell other products and services? Or are you leaving these important aspects of customer service up to employees to learn on their own?
Customer Service Training is one of the tools employees need to be successful in delivering superior customer service and to also provide a memorable experience for the customer – one that leads to repeat business. If you are serious about the success of your company, do not leave customer satisfaction to happenstance. Step outside of the box – the box that says customer service training is not a necessity to your business’ success and ensure that you provide consistent service training for your employees.
Think about it – as a customer, where would you continue to conduct business? At an establishment that provides superior service levels? Where employees are pleasant, interested in your needs, knowledgeable about company products and services, and are able to proficiently handle customer complaints or would you prefer to conduct business with an establishment where employees are average at best, disinterested in your needs, are not helpful or knowledgeable, indicate you are an annoyance and couldn’t care less if your patronized the business?
Influence this decision for your customers. Separate yourself from your competitors by consistently training your employees. Then monitor their performance to ensure your customers are receiving the highest level of service. Providing training without monitoring its success is ineffective. There are many ways to monitor the effectiveness of your customer service standards, training and employee performance. In my next blog we’ll cover some of the ways you can measure and monitor service levels.
Tip of the week: Customer Service Training cannot be optional.
