The Best Way to Prepare Your Teams to Improve the Customer Service and Experience

Business leaders are really starting to jump on board the Customer Experience Bandwagon. And for good reason.  The Customer Experience is no longer just a great idea, it’s now becoming a strategic initiative for more and more companies across the board.

I am often asked how to go about proposing the new focus on the customer experience to the staff and employees within the organization. Managers and owners are often fearful of resistance or lack of buy in. This is to be expected. Most people resist the process of change, regardless of the promised outcome.

The Wrong Way to Prepare Your Teams:  

Start by telling them that customers have been complaining about shoddy service for quite some time. Show them how many customers your team has cost them due to the bad customer service they’ve received.

Tell them that they should feel lucky that they even have jobs in the first place and that they need to step up and do their part and be nice to customers. When they ask what you mean by “be nice to customers” means, tell them just to smile and be friendly.

Tell them that they are going to have to sit through boring trainings where someone is going to tell them what to do. They’d better pay attention to the trainer and do what they say or they are going to be looking for another job soon.

You may laugh at the above examples, but sadly, they are far more common than you’d like to believe.

The Right Way to Prepare Your Teams:

Explain to your teams that…

• Most companies fail when they start to forget the customer is there SOLE reason for existence.
• They forget that the customer is the single most important person in their company and take them for granted.
• The smart and successful companies are now understanding the importance of the experience in the customer’s minds.
• Customers today are looking to do business with companies that make it simple, pleasant, and memorable.
• Customers are perfectly willing to spend up to 24% more with companies that deliver a better customer experience than the competitor down the road offering the EXACT same product or service.
• Our company understands and values the customer and the fact that they have kept us in business since _____.
• The company wants to invest in the teams to help develop the very best customer experience. We want to set ourselves apart by the service experience we deliver. We know that our customers have a choice of where to buy our product or service and we want them to select us simply because of the fact that we will work with them like no one else will.

Let them know what is coming up for them…

Over the next few months, we are going to be working together through some workshops and trainings to develop our skills in customer relationships.

• We’ll learn what is important to our customers, what they want, what they expect, and what makes them buy.
• We’ll discover how to manage their expectations and teach them how to get the most out of working with us.
• We’ll fine tune our communications strategies to be sure they understand what we are intending to convey both verbally and written.
• We’ll gain tools to help us work with customers when they are unhappy and turn the situation into one that they are impressed with the way we handled ourselves.
• We’ll learn a little bit of customer psychology and get into the minds of our customers to help strengthen our relationships with them that we’ve worked so hard to build.
• We’ll review the basics, become fabulous at the fundamentals, then build on those to become extraordinary.
• We are so proud of the time and energy you’ve put into this business unit so far and we know that this will also help you feel so much more empowered in your day to day lives here.

Explain what you expect from them…

What is required of you?

• An open mind.
• The willingness to learn.
• The ability to look at things from different perspectives.
• The dedication to implement what you’ve learned.
• The awareness that striving to improve does not mean you’ve been doing anything wrong, but that improving is always looking to make it even better.
• The desire to do everything you can to serve our customers and our company to the very best of your abilities.
• The courage to challenge the status quo.

Following these guidelines will dramatically improve the way that your team participates and works with you in your efforts to develop and improve your service and your culture.

Please click here for the podcast that further explains the above steps to gain more buy in from your teams.

You can listen to more episodes of the Transforming the Customer Experience Podcast series by clicking here.

Please share your thoughts below!