A few days ago I was sitting in a restaurant and there was a change in shifts.  As a result of the shift change, a new waitress approached the table and started clearing the used dishes and utensils without saying a word, making no eye contact with me, not even asking me if I was finished.   She seemed preoccupied about something.

Until the new waitress approached the table, I was experiencing a series of gastronomic delights.  Not only was the food delicious, the table service was meeting my expectations.   So back to the new waitress.  There could have been many things going on with her but it appeared to me, that serving restaurant patrons was a necessary evil and this negatively affected a previously delightful experience.  The impact of the surly waitress was that I will probably go to the restaurant again but not soon.

Business owners and executives know that quality customer service can help to differentiate their products and services so they often lament the bad customer service attitudes displayed by their front-line employees.  Their first thought is that they need to find a good customer service trainer to provide employees with training designed to improve customer satisfaction levels.

The trainer is hired and comes and goes. The participants have a learning experience and training evaluations are completed.  Based on the fun in the class and the positive training evaluations you are thinking the training day was a success.  You are optimistic about your plans for differentiation and then the following week, you watch for modified behaviors but the new skills are not being integrated into everyday customer service routines.

Last week I read an e-mail by a consultant that was part of a Caribbean HR Forum dialogue that sums this up.  The Consultant stated, “We ‘spray and pray’, with our myriad of training initiatives providing individuals with techniques, leaving their serving spirit underdeveloped.  With their awareness untouched, participants return to the workplace with great intentions that easily evaporate with uncaring, uninformed, busy and toxic Supervision.  How therefore do we get past these knee-jerk, reactive, piece-meal (customer service training) initiatives?”

 I always took the position that training in isolation will not work unless you have an extraordinarily motivated team and an organizational culture that wont “chew up and spit out” all attempts for cultural change.

Here is an example.  We usually go into a restaurant and no matter the quality of service we are obliged to pay a tip.  This creates a culture where the tip becomes an entitlement and not a motivator of quality customer service.  So how do you expect training alone to make a meaningful difference if your system undermines your training efforts?

Here are a few tips to help you to bring about authentic changes in customer service:

Create a Service Strategy

Your Customer Service Strategy should start with a vision for customer care.  Decide what you want customer service to look like and how you plan to move from your current state to your desired state.  This means you need to evaluate your actual service gaps and conduct cause and effect analyses so that you are strategizing based on root causes.

Customer Service Standards

As part of your Service Strategy exercise, create service standards.  Everyone should know and have access to the standards for customer service.   All employees should know that internal customers are just as important as external customers because in many cases, internal customers are serving external customers.

Performance Management

Identify key customer service competencies you would like your employees to embody so that customer service training can be specifically targeted at skill gaps.  The competencies can be integrated into performance appraisals so they can be used as drivers that will help you to customize customer service training.

Compensation and Reward

Review your compensation and reward systems to determine if they support the changes you would like to observe.  Whether or not employees are in an environment that makes gratuity part of the bill, employees probably expect tips. The big tippers usually get the best service.  Others who stick to the prescribed 10-15% don’t usually receive any extra effort.  Some organizations combat this by setting policies related to accepting tips so that employees are aware that there could be corrective action but this is difficult to monitor.

Customer Satisfaction Metrics

Decide how you will measure customer satisfaction.  Many organizations conduct customer satisfaction surveys and hold managers and supervisors responsible for results and action plans.  This process introduces an accountability factor that can lead to quality customer care.

Training

Customer service training should target actual deficiencies identified by your customer satisfaction survey and internal observation.  Targeted training practices combined with a customer service strategy can bring about meaningful results and authentic customer service.