Ten Ways Customer Service Development Is Misunderstood

As many marketplaces increasingly commoditise, the significance of delivering excellent customer service increases. That being the case, why do so many organisations deliver poor service making the majority of customer service experiences at best unmemorable and at worst hopeless?

Below we list the most common mistakes organisation make in delivering excellent customer service:

1. They have no working definition of service, what it is and what it isn’t.
2. There is no service measurement, no success/failure criteria.
3. Having nobody on the Board responsible for service success/failure. If everybody is accountable, nobody is accountable.
4. Service should be hard-wired into performance management across the whole organisation.
5. Poor understanding of customer requirements. Often an offering is designed around what works for the selling organisation rather than what works for the customer, Bank opening hours being a classic example.
6. Too much focus on front line exhortation to ‘go the extra mile’. Delivering excellent service cannot be demanded. Delighting the customer comes from discretionary effort; people have to be motivated to want to serve customers brilliantly.
7. No service design imperative. Excellent service starts with processes, systems, structures and tools not with smile training. All customers would rather receive right first time service delivered to meet their needs from somebody miserable, than a happy smiling person emphasising with them over why there has been a service failure.
8. The basics done brilliantly are more important than unasked for extras delivered on top of an unachieved minimum.
9. A dynamic and challenging customer feedback system.
10. People in front line roles who don’t like people. This is only a fair criticism of them when points 1-9 have been successfully achieved.

Laying out the issues that surround effective service delivery are straightforward, an organisations’ appetite and ability to make it happen is something else.

EQUIP Yourself To Deal With Complaints

Complaints – love them or loathe them? Irate customers or moaning minnies in your team? There will always be those people you just dread having to deal with. Whether they are justified or not, whether they are your customers or your staff - you still have to deal with them. Attitudes to complaints can reveal a great deal about certain individuals and organisations as a whole. How proactive are you in searching for and responding to complaints?

Whatever our view of complaints, there will always be those issues and concerns about which we are dissatisfied. People may grumble and moan about their grievances, but it is only when they actively complain that there is an opportunity to do something about it.

Here is a deceptively simple structure that can turn around a possibly confrontational situation. The important thing is to stick to the structure and do it well – not half-heartedly.

E - Explain clearly and concisely state what outcome you are aiming to achieve; in an assertive manner that shows genuine interest in finding a mutually beneficial result. You want your customer/staff member to go away happy, which does not necessarily mean giving them what they want.

Q - Question using open and probing questions to fully uncover their issues and concerns. Not just the problem, but how it affects them. The key here is to spend longer establishing the real underlying issues not just the easiest ones or the first things that comes up.

U - Understand show real empathy with their point of view, use ‘I appreciate’ and ‘I would feel/think that way too’. There is a difference between empathy and sympathy – make sure you know which is which and use it sincerely.

I - Influence their feelings/thinking by offering solutions and making suggestions that help them move nearer towards the desired outcome. Get them involved in identifying solutions and manage their expectations with thought and consideration.

P - Plan with their agreement what actions need to be taken, the timescales involved and who owns the actions. The action plan may not resolve the issue completely on this occasion but should show how improvement is to be achieved.

EQUIP is easy to remember and particularly effective way to handle complaints as long as you remember to ask the questions before suggesting the solution.

High Performance Sales Management – Bringing Performance To Life

2010 looks set to be a tough year, but one with plenty of opportunity for success, particularly for those sales teams that are performing at their best. Coming out of recession can be hard for sales teams, and they need the motivation and direction that an effective sales leader can offer. Structured Training’s High Performance Sales Management course gives leaders the insight they need to transform their sales team into a High Performing Sales Team.

The course gives sales leaders the opportunity to share ideas, concerns and best practice with people from other organisations, creating a great forum for challenging debate. The two days spent on High Performance Sales Management can set you up for a year of success. We’re confident it will make a positive difference for you and are offering a 30% discount to participants on our course running 9-10 March.

Here’s a selection of comments from participants on the last event:

• "All relevant, all needed"
• "Really good examples used from personal experience and other companies"
• "The course really brought the issues to life, everything linked in well and was relevant"
• "The course was so relevant to the evolution of our business"
• "The learning was related to actual examples from Andrew and the group"
• "The real life examples in the course were great"
• "The trainer had excellent knowledge and experience and was able to choose perfect examples to demonstrate points and answer questions"
• "The trainer’s knowledge was outstanding, with great delivery, using real world examples"
• "Useful tools for taking ownership of performance, gave me practical steps to take"

To book your place contact:

Claudine McClean
T: 01789 734300
E: claudinem@structuredtraining.com

New Year – New Direction For Your Training Plan

Most organisations, whenever their financial year starts, use the New Year as a time to look at their Training Plan and see if it’s fit for the year ahead. After the traumatic events experienced in 2009 all organisations need to plan for and anticipate the challenges expected in 2010.

To ensure your Training Plan for 2010 is fit for purpose – it should take into account two seemingly contrasting demands; is it focused on the organisation’s Vision, Values and Goals – what we call the Purpose Framework? Whilst at the same time taking into account the diverse training needs of the individuals that make up that organisation?

Off-the-Shelf Training: most organisations can find some benefit from generic training courses; whether ‘soft’ skills or more technical skills. Where they have small demand but well-defined training needs, these types or courses can give individuals useful tools and techniques to help them develop the required skills and knowledge back in the workplace.

Standard Corporate Training: larger organisations often have their basic skills from Induction through to Management Development programmes standardised to fit the organisation’s culture and predominant learning style. Where this approach leaves gaps in the individual’s training needs the next style is often required as well.

Coaching & Mentoring: again most organisations benefit from delivering some one-to-one training sessions where they can utilise the knowledge and skills of experienced people to support trainees toward their individual training objectives. These can be highly impactful and tailored to suit different learning styles although they are less cost-effective as a result.

Bespoke Solution Training: in order to bring together real organisational focus with interventions that are tailored to suit the individuals’ training styles, courses should be crafted specifically to have maximum impact in a cost-effective approach that maximises the contribution to success.

All four of the above training quadrants have their pros and cons; some are more cost-effective than others but may only have limited impact on diverse employee populations. Other methods may produce more profound results but are more costly in terms of time, cash and resources.

For 2010 to be a real turning point for your organisation and position you for success in the decade ahead, your Training Plan needs to utilise and combine these four approaches in the most business-effective manner.

The Compelling Business Case

With selling very much on the agenda for 2010, customers are increasingly looking to buy great value. When you’re up against stiff competition, making sure you’ve got a compelling business case for your offer can make the difference between making the sale and missing out. We’ve developed this in-house course to help your salespeople make the most of every selling opportunity.

This workshop has been developed for managers who have commercial responsibility and need a better grasp of the key business issues that must be addressed in a business case. It is a very practical course that will be immediately applicable in your business.

What You Will Learn

• The key questions and areas you should be addressing
• Analysing and utilising information within your reporting pack
• Developing a business case that focuses on ‘fact based selling’
• Linking your ‘story’ to key corporate strategies

Workshop Content

OPERATIONAL & CAPITAL INVESTMENT

• The principles of investment appraisal
• The key ROI methodologies used
• Quantification of benefits (hard, soft & intangible)
• Best, worst & likely cases – Sensitivity analysis
• Case study

BUSINESS CASE STRUCTURE

• The effective and high impact questions you need to ask to prepare your business case
• Business case structures & templates
• The key areas you must focus on: costs, margins & sales volumes
• The consequences of not getting your business case approved
• Translating business issues into business solutions

PRESENTATION IS KEY

• Presentations that have focus & impact
• Focusing on the requirements of your audience
• Identifying & delivering key messages with clarity & consistency

DRAGONS DEN

• The opportunity to present your business case to an audience of senior managers – and receive constructive feedback on whether it was compelling!

For further information on how this course could benefit your company, please contact Claudine McClean on 01789 734300.

10 Hopeless New Year Resolutions For Managers

I’m sure you’ve attempted to make some New Year Resolutions, some you might not have even broken yet. Below we list some you will be wasting your time making. How do we know? – because each year we hear managers say these are the things they are going to do better at, but seem to find very hard to achieve:

1. Demonstrate more leadership and less micro management. If anything this seems to be getting worse not better. Few managers seem to be able to inject greater leadership into their working practices.
2. Consistently make a more value-added contribution. Stand out from the crowded mediocre manager space through your insight and original perspective, rather than simply stating the obvious, confusing quality with quantity or producing poorly thought through ideas.
3. Trust people more.
4. Communicate more effectively. This is always near the top of the complaint list when employees are surveyed. Why is this so difficult? Note to self: there is no necessary relationship between how many minutes (hours?) a day you spend emailing/blackberrying and how well you communicate to your people.
5. Spend more time with customers and less behind a desk.
6. Pay more attention to success inputs rather than just measurable outputs. Profits, sales, GP etc are all consequences of doing something. Focus more on the doing. This seems to defeat many managers.
7. Design more effective bonus schemes, ones that promote the right behaviours as well as performance.
8. Smile more, not when it suits you, but when it would make a real difference to the meeting or situation.
9. Increase your learning.
10. Work less hard. Perspective is everything, many managers fail in obtaining some. Modern business life makes it very difficult to calibrate work rate or hours expended.

If you can apply even half of the 10 you will stand out from the crowd.

What Have We Learnt During 2009 From Clients Dealing With The Recession?

This year has, for most organisations, been one of the toughest on record. For some, still being in business in December 2009 is a significant achievement. We thought it would be interesting to try to consolidate the challenges, circumstances and learnings some of our clients have experienced this year and group them into a set of themes:

1. Organisations that got hold of two key financial levers very early on are coming out of the downturn stronger; (a) Quickly reducing their cost base to reflect income levels and (b) Nailing their cash management.
2. It was critical to get close to customers who were going to spend money in 2010. These were rarer but they were (are) in the market-place. Those that took a cold hard look at their pipeline and focused their energies accordingly did very well.
3. Kept key people on-side. When making redundancies the people who you keep are often ignored, they can suffer from survivor guilt, restlessness and low morale. Organisations that made efforts to demonstrate how much they valued this group have reaped the benefit of sustained engagement.
4. Visible leadership. Low morale is a function of poor management. In times of difficulty it's leaders that people are looking for. This means creating a realistic but positive mood, being more visible, increasing communications, being open about difficulties, keeping people informed about the businesses health, and perhaps most importantly, being a role model for the changes being asked of everybody.
5. Maintaining a strategy. Yes, tactical survival is all that matters when you’re really struggling, but the future still needs to be thought about. Management teams that kept part of their thinking directed on the medium term can now think about growth with a serviceable plan.
6. Not expecting the recovery to be demand led. Organisations that are waiting to see demand come back will improve their business levels in 2010 over 2009, but only in relatively small amounts. The organisations that are already doing better are ones where they are seeking to take share, take a more compelling offer to market, or in some other way shake up their market place. Double digit growth will only be delivered by pro-active organisations.

These six themes have reoccurred throughout 2009. How did you measure up?