Equipping Staff to Provide Effective Service

Lecturer Broadcast

Click here to view an explanation about staff improvement plan.

Klik hier om na ‘n verduideliking van die personeelverbeteringsplan te luister.

Explanation by Lecturer Johan Kleingeld from Edge Consulting, expert on customer services.

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 a number of 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 understand the customers’ requirements for the highest standards of service.

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

Here are some examples of empowered front-line employee actions in terms of customer service:

Customer Service Communication

Customer service communications cut across traditional company boundaries, impacting on perceptions of the company as a whole and on perceptions of individual departments. It is therefore important that customers’ service messages are understood and presented consistently throughout the company. Research should be carried out within the company to assess the understanding of customer service issues at corporate level and within product groups and departments responsible for customer contact.

Are we Consistent in Messages to Customers?

Look at the content of communications projects to ensure that it reflected current customer service positioning messages and was relevant to the information needs of the target audience. Presentations, brochures, videos, internal communications, advertisements and press information should incorporate constant customer service messages.

Are we Effective in Our Support of the Sales Process

Considerable opportunities exist for developing customer service through the sales force. Assess the level of customer service awareness within the sales force and look at the potential for increasing motivation to build service.

The sales force currently receives information on products and marketing development from all product groups. The audit will consider whether the customer service information they receive is relevant to their information needs and whether it is presented in a convenient persuasive form.

Review the channels of sales force communication available to assess which would be the most effective for customer service messages.

Staff Improvement Programmes

While it is essential to let all your staff know how they can contribute to customer service, it is equally important to get the highest standards of performance from key staff whose actions have a direct impact on the customer – the customer-facing staff who are in regular contact and who are seen by the customers as the personification of the company. By identifying those people and analysing the skills they need to achieve the highest levels of satisfaction, the company can concentrate its training and resources on key activities.

Sales staff for example has to undergo major changes in attitude if they are to adopt a customer care role. Sales force performance is vital to effective management of customer relationships, but sometimes sales staff is more concerned with the drive for short-term maximisation of revenue and this can interfere with building long-term relationships. Continuity of contact, for example, is essential, but sales time is vital, and it may be necessary to appoint other staff to support the direct sales force.

Customer reception staff is also in the front line and it’s important that they are supported not just with training and skills development, but with the technology to make the customer reception process as effective and convenient as possible. The introduction of single points of contact and efficient call transfer has simplified the problem of customer access.

By targeting areas like this where there is immediate and measurable improvement to be made, the company can make significant improvements in customer satisfaction.

The success of companies often vary according to the overall spirit that exist among their employees. In some organisations there is are high energy levels, a sense of accomplishment and even a sense of excitement and this inevitably lead to success.

Naturally managers dearly love to see service-mindedness in their employees and do recognise it when they see it, but do not know what causes it.

To have a high standard of service, it is necessary to create and maintain a motivating environment in which staff can find personal reasons for committing their energies to the benefit of the customer.

Quality customer service will not happen unless you train for it to happen.

A variety of problems are found in training programmes. One commonly cited criticism is that training programmes rely too much on passive learning techniques and not enough on participant involvement; such are role-playing, simulations and case studies. Related to this is the argument that customer care training concentrates on ensuring that the trainees understand various service situations, rather than on how they will perform or behave in those situations.

Too often management approves a training programme hoping that it will solve all the company’s service problems and then sends the trainees back to their posts without planning and follow-up activities. During the training, interest and morale are built up, only to disappear a few weeks later. All is forgotten, and the staff goes back to doing things in the way they did before the training took place. And managers are not coaching or helping them apply what they have learned. This is like training a rugby team before the start of the season and then not using the coach for the rest of the season.

Properly used, training and development can provide huge payoffs in service performance. It is not always possible to trace a direct monetary relationship between training investment and profit, but the qualitative advantages are easy to identify. Fortunately, some training methods have evolved to a sophisticated level. Techniques of job analysis and the assessment of training needs can produce well-designed training programmes targeted at the needs of the organisation.

The key to the success of a training programme is to know what you want the trainees to be able to do when they have finished. An effective programme starts with job analysis. Current incumbents should be observed and/or interviewed to determine what they actually have to do in order to serve the customer well. A job analysis should spell out the knowledge, attitudes and skills required of the person doing the job.

Once you know what it takes to a do a particular job well, you can establish the most cost-effective way of helping people learn the skills required. If the job knowledge and duties are fairly simple, then on-the-job training should be a carefully planned process in which the trainee learns by doing, while being productively employed. Furthermore, a good on-the-job training programme contains established procedures of evaluating and reviewing the trainee’s progress.

Reporting Progress

Any programme will fail if people are not kept up to date with progress. Such abound of companies that fail to notify winning staff of their success in award schemes and of programmes that quickly lose their impetus because nobody is providing continuity.

Any customer loyalty programme should have elements of continuity built into it:

• A magazine, which features examples of successful individuals or organisations, can act as a prompt and motivates people.
• Letters from senior executives congratulating high achievers and inviting them to participate in an achievement programme will help to maintain interest and motivation.
• Meetings, which recognise the achievements of the whole company, can help to bring people together and build that vital team spirit.