This is the second article in the Customer Service Experience series that will help you educate, develop, and reward your teams around the behaviors that support creating exceptional customer service experiences.
How can you create a better customer service experience in your organization?
Every member of your team has a responsibility to create exceptional customer service experiences. This is true for any industry such as healthcare, foodservice, hospitality, insurance, banking, and retail to name just a few.
There are 3 key elements that will help owners and managers ensure great customer service experiences by formalizing communication and recognition standards. These elements are:
- Determining customer service expectations.
- Communicating expectations to employees (training).
- Recognizing employees.
We’ll discuss the second element today: Communicating Expectations to Employees
Communicating Expectations to Employees
Now that you’ve determined WHAT your service expectations are, now you’ll need to determine HOW you’ll get the word out to employees about those expectations. How do you communicate with employees now, casual conversation in passing, bulletins, memos, texting, or emails? Do you have quarterly or yearly meetings?
When you do communicate with staff what types of items are you reviewing, safety, cleanliness, or policies? Are service expectations ever discussed? Are employees ever encouraged to discuss their customer experiences with you or others? What specific types of interactions are your employees having with your customers? Are they positive or negative? What level of empowerment does your staff have to make customer service decisions, and are they aware of that level?
Organizations who meet regularly with staff call their meeting many different things, pre-meals, post-shifts, time clock gatherings, huddles. Regardless of what you call them, here are some good practices regarding communicating your standards and expectations:
- Team meetings should be led by managers, supervisors, or team leaders only.
- Write down your talking points or even a script to make sure you get all points across you need to make.
- Meetings should be brief, 7-10 minutes, once each week, and at times when most of the staff is available and free from your busiest times of the day. You will probably need to have several team meetings to get to the entire staff.
- Additional talking points, such as HR, safety & sustainability can be discussed, but creating customer service experiences must be first.
- Start your meeting with a brief, positive customer service example. What are your employees doing right?
- Be specific in discussing some of the challenges your organization and team might be having and ways to overcome them. Discuss facts when available such as customer feedback, or customer survey scores.
- Make sure to set attainable service goals with communication on progress in future meetings.
If you are already having employee team meetings, which of the above are you practicing? Which are more important in your environment?
Are you currently recognizing members of your team for outstanding customer service? We’ll discuss ways to recognize your team members for meeting or exceeding your customer’s expectations in Article 3 of this series: Recognizing Employees.
