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Take a moment to remember a time when you were blown away by someone’s service. Maybe a restaurant, a hotel or a company you did business with. What did they do that was so impressive? My guess is that it boils down to how their customer service training was executed.
My guess is they were thinking ahead about the journey the customer will take dealing with them. They thought of how to make the check in or check out easier. They thought of anything a customer may require and had it on hand. This helped build a feeling of a relationship, not a transaction. Mostly they were trained to think ahead and then trained to deliver.
Inspect Your Customer Service Training
How does your team stack up in terms of anticipating customer needs? How is their training on delivering this experience?
Our goal at my company is to help our clients to figure out that path their customer takes to engage with them and we look at each step to make sure they are prepared. It may be their website design, or how their offline marketing speak to their online marketing or lastly how they interact with their customers once they are contacted.
Each of these steps needs a plan, consultation and then training for execution. Too many times we find new clients coming to us having only focused on one of these aspects. They have not mapped the journey of a customer through each department in their company. Each department may have taken a look at just their responsibility but there has not been a unified approach across all departments.
Let’s look at an example of a consumer journey and the areas you can inspect for ways to streamline your process.
- Marketing: Offline / Online / Onsite.
- First Contact: Website form / Phone call / Email
- On Site contact: What happens when they comes to your location
- Sales Process
- Delivery Process
- Follow up / Repeat Customer Process
Have you mapped out the journey and aligned each department or touch point with a unified message or thought of what a customer would need?
Is there a way to streamline paperwork, or getting a customer through the sales process quicker?
Once you have these initiatives, a well structured customer service training program needs to be implemented. (click here for a recommended training process)
Any place where you can think of ways to be one step ahead of your customer and make their interaction with you easier will help you to retain and grow your revenue for years to come
If I can be of service or you would like to bounce ideas around feel free to reach out to me. I will be more than willing to help.
Glenn Pasch is the current CEO of PCG Digital Marketing as well as a writer, National Speaker and Management Trainer.
If you liked this article, please share with others and connect with me @glennpasch