The Customer Service Training Change: Why Most Things You’ve Been Told is Outdated
Customer Experience training is needed for any customer based company.
Here’s what hit me during a memorable project with a successful Melbourne sales organisation: they had rarely committed a dollar in traditional customer service training, yet their patron loyalty scores were continuously among the highest in their industry
Twenty years in corporate working with companies, and I believe the vast majority of what masquerades as “training” these days is just costly feel good garbage that makes people managers look useful while delivering absolutely zero
I recently completed a comprehensive evaluation examining the enduring outcomes of customer service training courses across multiple diverse companies. The results were alarming
Despite substantial amounts of dollars committed in expert education workshops, guest loyalty metrics showed little sustainable progress. Sometimes, results actually regressed over the following year of training ending. Great benefit on spending, right?
The difficult reality about customer service improvement programs is that it targets the wrong challenges
Core customer service difficulties don’t result from insufficient technical competency
Proper customer service has nothing to do with procedures and all to do with authentic contact
The coin clicked for me during a awful training program I ran in Darwin back in 2010
Comprehensive workbooks, practical workshops, evaluation systems Yet customers repeatedly reporting variable experiences and communicating disappointment with their experiences. Yet visitors were still expressing dissatisfaction about poor service treatment. Customer experience results? Still absolutely awful. I guess Customers can get and idea on these emotions in the business premises also.
The essential insight occurred when I commenced analysing the structural conditions in which staff were functioning. Required me six months to figure out we were instructing people to sound like robotic phone systems instead of real people
What I uncovered was that employee desire to create outstanding service was being consistently thwarted by structural barriers
Companies see it as an overhead to reduce instead of an opportunity to develop
When your company culture fails to actually appreciate customer experience, team members will rapidly figure out what truly matters. When executives regards customer service as a cost to be limited, instead of an investment to be enhanced
They recruit low cost staff, offer elementary support, then are puzzled when customer satisfaction suffers. They recruit the lowest cost workers they can locate, give them basic training, then wonder why customers moan about poor service
This produces a destructive dynamic: businesses allocate budgets in training to resolve performance problems, the programs disappoints because it fails to fix the root problems, so they spend in more courses
In the meantime, the real problems dysfunctional recruitment processes, conflicting objectives, limited support, negative workplace environments persist unresolved. I know clients can get and idea on these vibes
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