Equipping Staff to Provide Effective Service

The commitment and involvement of staff is essential to customer service. You need to involve people at all levels in the recommendations, decisions, and actions you take to build customer service. That way, you maximise the use of your people’s talents and at the same time achieve their active commitment. The power of people to improve performance is enormous when they are committed.

To achieve this, you need to take several actions:

• Provide information at all levels, including information, which in the past might have been regarded as confidential and open only to top management.
• Improve co-operation across all departmental functions so that people understand and are committed to your business objectives.
• Improve the quality and attitude of your people by actively encouraging staff to develop their own skills through training and career development.
• Encourage people who have taken their own customer care initiatives.

Customer loyalty is built on quality service and the key to that is the quality of people:

• Recruiting people who are motivated to succeed through achievement.
• Provide staff with continuous specialist and quality training to develop their own personal skills.
• Ensure that staff understands the customers’ requirements for the highest standards of service.

Empowering staff to make decisions and act independently when problems arise can have huge benefits for the company. On the next page is a summary of what employee empowerment is, the benefits as well as examples of how it can be implemented.