“It’s so frustrating; why don’t my staff just get it? After all, customer service is common sense, you’d think it’d be easy! But, they just have no idea how to deal with customers.”
Sound familiar? It can be tough finding good customer service staff, right? It’s tricky to find someone who’s a good listener, a good communicator, wants to work hard and can focus on solutions not problems. Add on top of that someone with common sense, an instinctive understanding of how to handle different types of customers, doesn’t take things personally, has a desire to please and is available in your area… It can feel like you’re asking the impossible!
But why? Why is it hard to find these people? Well, a lot of this stuff isn’t actually instinctive, it needs to be learnt. So how does your team learn these things? Sure you can throw them in at the deep end and they can watch the others and hopefully pick it up that way. That might work. More likely it won’t. What’s more likely to happen is that they’ll fumble their way through, make mistakes, feel stressed, pick up some bad habits and disappoint a few customers along the way.
A better way to solve this problem is to make sure they are actually told how to handle customers. In detail. How? Put in place a continual training program that covers all the fundamentals of customer service, spelling out what to do, what not to do and why.
“Continual training program? Sure – when are we going to get the time and money to do that? That’s something that only huge organisations can take the time to invest in and they generally have the worst customer service of all! We simply don’t have the time or budget for our team to be continually attending tedious training courses on basic stuff they should know already.”
It doesn’t have to be like that.
Here’s what you need to do:
There’s a lot of basic stuff about customer service your team should know but don’t. You don’t have the time to train them properly and they don’t want to be sitting through boring training sessions. But they have to learn this stuff.
So get them to learn online! Introduce them to a new concept each day (or each week, it’s up to you) and have them focus on that one concept so they really get it. Tell them what to do, what not to do and why, and explain it to them with examples. Then the next day, or the next week, introduce the next concept, until you’ve covered all the important stuff, like how to speak to a customer over the phone, how to deal with customers over email, what to do with an angry customer, how to handle a customer with an analytical personality or one with an expressive personality. I could go on.
You can actually do all this and more in just a few minutes. Send short, practical, to-the-point training videos directly to your teams inbox. Videos that cover everything about interacting with customers, over the phone, face to face and online. Your team can watch them anywhere, at any time, and as many times as they want. You can select which training modules your team works through, you can schedule them to arrive in their inbox when you want and you can monitor their learning by reviewing the results of the online quiz they do at the end of each module. What’s more it’s not expensive. It’s actually very, very affordable. Oh and the best part? The videos are really, really good. Check them out here and see what you think.
