Do-It-Yourself Customer Service Training: Get Success Now!
One of the joys of delivering Achieving Excellence in Customer Service has been and continues to be the “aha” moments that the participants take away. Most of the time when I have delivered this course, the participation has been mandatory, prescribed by top management. Delivering a mandatory course is different from delivering an “optional” course: It’s a tougher sell to the participants. That said, one of the key themes of the course is that participants can manage the customer’s experience and that, by doing so, manage their own service workloads better, gaining additional control over the service encounter, and reducing a lot of repetitive or just plain “nuisance” work that comes from customers who lack confidence that they are actually going to get what they came looking for. Participants like the idea that by managing the customer’s experience, they get a better handle on managing their own workloads and this increases job satisfaction at the same time that it raises customer satisfaction. That’s a pretty good bargain.
Another thing that participants enjoy is the idea that they can “turn this course inside out” and use it to gain better customer service for themselves when they are off the job and functioning as consumers.
Sometimes participants will say, “management wants us to work harder and faster and we are already maxed out.” This is where the power of setting customer expectations so you underpromise and overdeliver comes to be understood. If you can’t change the reality and perception of service speed and responsiveness because you are already maxed out, you can change the expectations of the customer so that you can exceed them and cause customer satisfaction.
In other cases, participants report that their customers call them often to find out about the status of a solution that they are seeking–whether it’s a decision to be made or a product to be delivered. This course teaches that if you want to avoid those customer follow-up calls on a schedule that suits the customer, then you can manage the customer by committing to provide periodic status updates. Seems simple enough, but think about your own experience as a customer and how infrequently it happens.
Finally, there is a tendency for those of us delivering service to become a bit robotic, particularly when we are having the same transactions or encounters over and over again. A case in point is picking up the prescription at the pharmacy: The question is always asked: What is your address? When you provide your address in anticipation of the regularly-asked question, 9 times out of 10 the person at the counter will ask: What is your address?
When this happens, we can often forget to see the encounter and experience from the customer’s point of view. Turning service “inside out” so that the person providing the service sees it clearly from the customer viewpoint is another power tool that this training imparts.
There are also phrases and techniques that the course provides that are very powerful in shaping the customer’s experience and which boost job satisfaction as well. Fact is, the tie between customer satisfaction and job satisfaction is huge. It’s pivotal. This course emphasizes this link in a big way..
Based on decades of success delivering our “Achieving Excellence in Customer Service” to a wide variety of audiences in the private and public sectors, we are now offering a Do-It-Yourself course.
This is a course that is fun to deliver, full of straightforward principles and skills that can be put to work immediately. Even if you haven’t trained before or have only trained a few times, we have scripted the training in a way that will have you performing as a customer service training virtuoso in no time.
For more information, please see detailed product information.
Customer Retention: Do Your Employees Understand its Effect on Their Paychecks?
Just about every business owner or corporation executive who is awake understands that it is far more costly to obtain a new customer than retain an existing one. This concept is even more near and dear to core tenets of running a business—in an uncertain economy.
Here’s the dilemma that consumers witness over and over like a recurring bad dream: Many employees who interact with customers do not understand the importance of customer loyalty to the bottom line of a company. Repeat customers help pay your salary. Fewer repeat customers, more expense required to find new ones… something might need to be cut from the budget… like your salary!
Granted some customers can be difficult; however, when a loyal customer has an issue, the customer service representative needs to be motivated to deal with it effectively AND know how to create a win-win resolution.
Consider this example: A customer takes his out-of-warranty vehicle for a routine oil change, and is told at the end of that service that the vehicle has a slow leak that needs to be addressed in the near future. Cost for this “recommended repair”—as written on invoice—is $1100. The customer is in shock. Not being a trust-fund baby, he says he needs to sleep on it.
The customer does some research and finds out that part of the problem is that the entire transmission has to be taken out to fix this small leak at a cost of $92/hour plus parts. It appears that since very few of these types of repairs have been made by this service department that the customer is paying, in part, for the staff’s learning curve. Further, upon following up with the service department, the customer is informed that the original quote was incorrect, it is really $1800 to repair the leak and, by the way, “You need a 30,000-mile service which costs an additional $600.” Now the customer has gone from shock to hopping mad. He is ready to leave his vehicle parked outside his house and buy a clunker for the $2400—and put a bumper sticker on the clunker that says “My other car is an X but I cannot afford to drive it.”
How should the dealership’s service department deal with this situation? Here are some options:
- Make certain that each employee is carefully trained so that when he/she quotes a price for a repair, especially when it is in writing, that it is correct.
- Stand by any inaccurate price quotes, giving the customer the benefit of the doubt.
- Charge the customer $1800 for the 30,000-mile service AND the repair of the leak to compensate for the inaccurate quote and encourage repeat business.
- Tell the customer that they are sorry
- Ignore the situation entirely
The answers that are more likely to help the dealership keep the customer? Hopefully, you know that they are a combination of 1, 2, and 3 above.
Final thoughts:
- A customer really doesn’t want to hear that someone is sorry for someone misquoting a price. “Sorry,” does not put more money in his/her bank account.
- Make certain that your staff knows what they are doing when they interact with customers. Each person needs to understand the importance of retaining loyal customers to their individual financial livelihood.
- Each employee needs to be given license to ask a manager when they find themselves in deep water rather than risk alienating a loyal customer.
If you and your employees are in tune on the importance of customer retention, you will keep more customers and run a much more profitable business.
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