Customer Service Training

Customer Service Training

Hi everybody. Customer service is one of the most important areas of a business in the world. End of story. You can have the best product, you can have the best service offering, but if you do not have your people trained to receive feedback that maybe they don’t like, or are not used to, or don’t know how to deal with — and they deal with it improperly — the cost of losing a customer, and not knowing why, or why they left, or even if they left, is a lot more than you can even imagine.

Many years ago, when I started at Concord Communications in Beverly Hills, a message management company that signed a deal with Bell Canada to revolutionize the telephone answering service industry in the US, I got really, really into service — even though my role as a VP of a very small company was to work with the packaging and the marketing of this, to transform the way people perceived what was being offered there as something distinctly different. But to do that, I had to get involved in training the people that were there, and working with the owner of the company to train the new people coming in — because most people that came to a telephone answering service job were high-stressed, underpaid, worked too hard under terrible lighting for long hours, and the service industry got the reputation it did for the reasons that all of those amounted to.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant where it’s a humble restaurant? It doesn’t really have great food. It has okay food, but the people are so nice and so welcoming and so warm that you want to go back? That’s what I’m talking about. You can have a higher-grade restaurant food quality and have very austere, unwelcoming, disconnected service. And I believe that the service that’s offered at a company flows from the consciousness of the management and the consciousness of that company or that organization. It’s not dissimilar. Okay.

So to not invest in customer service training because maybe you don’t think it’s worth it, because you don’t pay the people enough to invest in their training — big mistake. They could be your biggest champions, your biggest advocates, great with customers, and your customers, due to their interactions with them, will refer a ton of business to you.

There’s a lot of hidden things about customer service that a lot of owners don’t know — heads of business and companies. They say that they respect and they admire the culture, and they believe in customer service. But the real training today — over the last ten years, the real training today is needed desperately. The quality of customer service has dropped so severely. I can’t tell you how many restaurants I go to where, once the server comes up to you, they don’t check in on you frequently enough, and the place can have really, really good food — or they’re chatting with one table too long and ignoring the other tables, or worse, I see this in a lot of restaurants: servers will go back and get on their phone and start texting. A phone, a cell phone — the dirtiest thing they could have in their hands — and they have it, and they’re on their phone, or they’re texting.

And any of this that goes on in businesses in front of customers has to be a big no-no. Big no-no. And most importantly is that people need to understand why it’s a no-no — because retaining the business is about staying in connection with the customer and understanding what a customer is. And when you lose a customer due to emanating or transmitting that you don’t care, you’re disconnected from them, they don’t mean enough to you, they don’t bring in enough business for you to care about it — they receive it. We live in a vibrational world. People pick up way more than many people think they do. Everything is communicated vibrationally — not just in the spirit, not just in words, or the content that’s spoken.

So when you think about investing in people that you hire, think carefully about this — the way things are done, the way things are handled with a customer. You know? And a lot of organizations, interestingly enough — sometimes it’s not the customer, like it’s not the service provider’s fault for things. Sometimes they’re at the mercy of bad organizational protocols, bad organizational processes. An owner that doesn’t care about certain things. So investing in customer service — whether a business owner thinks the person makes enough money to warrant a training — never underestimate what one person can do to retain clients, to spread goodwill, to actually inspire other people to bring in new business. A good customer service person is a salesperson.

Imagine that. A good customer service person is a natural-born salesperson. Don’t ever forget that. The server that takes care of people at a restaurant — I don’t care what kind of restaurant it is, it could have just okay food — means a lot to that place for business. Return business, repeat business, referrals. It matters.

And it’s dropped in the United States. I’ve traveled all over Europe and the United States. It’s dropped severely in the United States, the service business — I mean, excuse me, customer service.

Call 626-398-8652 if you’d like me to train your team. I love it. It’s a gift, and I’d like to up-level your entire team so that the people that assist you, that work for you, are actually natural-born salespeople who understand what their full job is and how important it really is. Thank you very much.