ASSESS YOUR SERVICE

Your service personnel have many opportunities every day to impress, delight, and even dazzle your customers.

But if they’re going to seize those opportunities, you have to train them, first and foremost, to avoid the pitfalls that cause so many front-liners to fail. Below we’ve listed 12 of the most common complaints that people have about service personnel. Do any of them apply to your team? Your answer will help you determine the direction your customer service intervention will take.

The 12 Pitfalls: Most Common Customer Complaints About Service People

1. They are nowhere to be found.

2. They are present but unavailable to serve customers.

3. They are available but rude, rushed, or indifferent.

4. They are engaged and polite, but unknowledgeable.

5. They provide customers with misinformation or conflicting information.

6. They are too slow.

7. They make mistakes.

8. They unnecessarily complicate transactions.

9. They are unable to solve small problems.

10. They are unable to deal effectively with customer complaints.

11. They embarrass customers for not doing something correctly.

12. They fail to meet, much less exceed, customer expectations.

The Pitfalls—Underlying Causes

We found that when front-liners consistently receive such complaints, usually one or more of these causes are involved:

1. The front line is overstaffed (leading to lack of urgency) or understaffed (leading to lack of coverage).

2. The team is made up of the wrong people; that is, there are too many low-level, mediocre performers and not enough high-level, outstanding ones.

3. The team lacks the tools and support it needs.

4. Team members don’t care about service.

5. Team members have insufficient training in customer service fundamentals.

6. Team members too often lose their focus on service and thus “drop the ball.”

7. Team members are not held accountable for delivering dazzling customer service.

As we mentioned earlier, many business processes have an impact on customer service. However, each of the underlying causes above falls squarely within the realm of your day-to-day supervisory responsibilities:

staffing (1, 2), training (3, 5), motivation (4), and performance management (6, 7).

These essential processes lie at the heart of any intervention.

Assessing Your Service: Key Steps

We highly recommend that before you spend time and energy on staffing, training, motivation, or performance management, you and your team engage in a thorough self-evaluation. You want clear answers to the questions “What’s going right with this team and individual?” and “What’s going wrong with this team and individual?”

We have developed the term “cash-register culture” to describe the social dynamic that develops among front-line personnel in a customer service workplace. Because front-liners spend so much time together on a regular basis, they build interpersonal relationships. “Customers just pass through,” some of them think, “but I spend hours with my coworkers, day after day.”

Often these relationships and how they are conducted have a huge impact on the team’s ability to deliver customer service.

They very easily can distract front-liners from their customers.

The key question for you as the supervisory manager is this:

Does your cash-register culture focus your front-line personnel on each other—or on your customers?

Then you can ask, “What will it take to help this team and individual deliver excellent customer service?”

There are four key steps to this critical requirement:

• Step 1. Evaluate your team in terms of the common customer service complaints and their possible underlying causes. Do customers complain about your team in any of the 12 areas we’ve identified?

In any other areas? If so, how often? Why does this happen? What can be done about it?

• Step 2. Evaluate your management role in relation to the common complaints and possible underlying causes. Do you contribute to any of these complaints?

How? What have you done to address them? Have those steps been effective? What more can you do? Are you willing to make a commitment to eliminating these complaints? Are you willing to commit to playing a more hands-on role as a trainer, coach, and supervisor to make dramatic improvements in your team’s delivery of customer service? Are you willing to hold each team member 100 percent accountable for delivering great customer service?

• Step 3. During your initial training session, ask members to evaluate their team in terms of the common complaints and possible underlying causes.

Does the team consistently receive one or more of these complaints? If so, how often? Why? What do you suggest should be done about it?

• Step 4. Finally, ask members to evaluate themselves individually in relation to the common complaints and possible underlying causes. Does the member contribute to one or more of these complaints?

How? What has he or she done to improve matters? Have those steps been effective? What more can this member do to improve matters? Is he or she willing to make a commitment to a new customer service mission for this team and be held100 percent accountable for it? Is the member willing to be a customer service leader on the team?