Training to Provide a World-Class Customer Experience

Sign up for our free webinar featuring John Dijulius. He will also be speaking at our “Driving Incremental Revenue with Outstanding Service” event on March 11th.

A common misconception is that the only way to get better employees is to pay more than everyone else. There are many great examples of world-class companies who do not necessarily pay better than their competitors. In fact, employees at Disney, Starbucks, and Nordstrom are hired from the same labor pool every other organization uses and are paid the going rates. The real reason why their people are so good at customer service is how well they are transformed in their training.

Customer loyalty is won or lost at the front lines. However, in most companies the most recently hired, least trained, lowest paid employee deals with customers the most often. What determines the consistency of delivering the “experience” is the quality of the systems and training that every new and existing employee goes through. Inadequate training is definitely the biggest underlying reason for the inconsistency and scarcity of great customer service. Companies skimp on training because it costs money, but companies that invest in customer service by training their new employees reap great financial benefits. Just like in sports, the contest, match or game is decided long before the actual event takes place - it is won in practice; by the preparation leading up to the event.

To be a world class customer service organization, your training should include the following:

• A company orientation that covers company policy and the company’s history

• The functional components of the specific job as they benefit the company as a whole(e.g., responding to customer e-mails on a timely basis)

• The operational procedures (i.e., daily tasks) of the job

• All technical training, including product knowledge, use of equipment/tools, software and other technology, and scope of services

• Experiential training on soft skills, especially how to create relationships and personalize encounters, how to prevent customers from feeling like transactions, and customer recovery techniques

• On-the-job shadowing of an experienced employee

• Testing and certification, including extensive testing on experiential skills.

Map the Customer’s Experience Journey

Another key process to effective customer service training is to establish a customer service training manual. To begin the process, identify all the significant points of interaction—called stages—that your customers may have with your company. These stages add up to your customer’s experience.

Once you have mapped out your customer experience stages, you need to get your employees involved in helping create what those stages should look like. You then break each stage down into four individual components:

• Service Defects: All the things that can ruin the customer’s experience at this stage.

• Operational Standards: All the tasks or jobs for each stage.

• Experiential Standards: The actions that will create an exceptional experience and a raving fan.

• Above-and-Beyond Opportunities: Common situations that we want our front-line employees to recognize and be prepared for in order to make a customer’s day.

Let your team help create this experience. Once you have your final version of the stages, you can create a training manual (a sample page is pictured lower right corner) that all new employees are trained and tested on during their first two weeks with your company. Once complete, this training manual will not only set expectations for new employees right away, it also serves as a guide to decision making for employees throughout their tenure.

Action Plan

It is imperative for companies to ensure that every employee—new and existing— truly understands their organization’s customer experience promise. The customer experience promise is what the organization is supposed to deliver to their customers, consistently, at every stage of their interaction.