November FAQ - How do I get My Team to Provide Better Levels of Customer Service?
One Friday each month I dedicate the post to looking at some questions I have heard recently from developing leaders. Sharing those questions and my thoughts for them is a way for me to spread the information to as many leaders and future leaders as possible. If you have a question about leadership, or just a situation you would like some additional insight on, please email me at Effective Retail Leader. Let’s take a look at this week’s question.
I want to improve the customer experience in my store. How can I get my team to provide better levels of customer service?
A great question. And one that is likely asked countless times in stores, restaurants, and businesses across the country and world. Delivering consistently great customer service is hard. Otherwise, we would not have nearly as many books, courses, articles, or businesses built on how to provide better customer service. Of course, there are a few standards that set the pace. Disney, Nordstroms, Ritz-Carlton, Chick-fil-A, and Southwest Airlines are all examples of that. If we were to ask each of those companies, though, they would tell anyone, it didn’t happen overnight, they do have service failures from time to time, it takes a lot of ongoing work to maintain it, and it is just part of their culture.
I have written about culture previously. It does not happen because you say you want it to or because you hold a training course. Providing consistently high levels of service is a culture. Moving your team towards a better service experience can be done, but it will take time, practice, follow up, and persistence. Here are a few steps you can take to begin your journey forward.
Consistent Standards and Expectations
As with most new things, you must be clear with your team on what you are looking for and how you expect them to behave. Knowing this may be a journey, there are likely multiple steps you will need to establish. I would recommend sharing a customer experience vision with your team. What does the perfect experience in your business look like? Help your team imagine what is possible. Once you establish what great looks like, you can begin to break the necessary steps of how to get there into manageable chunks to work on.
Model
This step is no secret either - your team will look at your behaviors to see how they should act themselves. If you paint a terrific vision of what excellent service looks like, but then you do not exhibit those expected behaviors, you will never get anyone else to do so either. You must be the model of excellence. That doesn’t mean you need to be perfect. Acknowledge when the new steps are hard, even for you. Use those as opportunities to train from for everyone. That will send a very clear message that it is not about perfection; it is about improvement along the way. Continue to show the way.
Practice and Coach
Training is one necessary step in helping the team understand the expectations and how to deliver on the next experience. However, we all know there is a big difference between reading books, watching videos on service, or listening to others talk about how to deliver customer service and actually delivering that experience to real customers.
It will take practice on everyone’s part to get better and master different levels of engaging your customers every day, every interaction. The role you play in that is to observe behaviors for learning. Create a safe environment where everyone knows that anyone else can observe and provide feedback and coaching in the mindset of improvement. Titles, experience, and roles cannot define who can observe and coach customer service. It is everyone’s responsibility.
Customer service is one of my favorite topics. I could probably spend hours talking about it. But I have never thought it was easy. It takes an enormous amount of effort to consistently deliver an outstanding experience. Every customer AND every associate is different. Creating the right messaging and environment for an associate to know they are empowered and expected to deliver on a customer service promise only comes with time. You will not get to your perfect customer service vision overnight, but every day represents an opportunity to get one step closer. Keep the vision clear, set the stage for success, and champion the cause along the way, and soon you will see more and more smiles on the faces of your customers and associates.
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