Companies engage customers and develop loyalty by hiring and retaining employees with the right customer service skills and attitudes.
To accomplish this, managers need to identify the customer service skills, values and attitudes that the best performing employees bring to work and use to create that irresistible experience.
Begin with these six steps:
- Identify what exceptional customer service looks like for your customers.
- Identify what skills, values, and attitudes an employee needs to deliver that experience.
- Identify what is holding current employees back from achieving results you expect.
- Assess employees to find common individual performance barriers.
- Remove work environment barriers that impede employees from doing their job.
- Introduce customer service enhancing skills.
The order to apply these steps and create the irresistible customer service experience is critical. If you introduce performance enhancing skill training before you remove individual employee performance barriers (non or counter-productive behaviors and attitudes), you will achieve short-term rewards but long-term de-motivation and stress.
In the high stakes game of acquiring and retaining customers it is often the slight edge that counts. Hiring and retaining the employees with the right customer service skills gives you the power of the slight edge.
The opportunity for your business to thrive well into the twenty-first century is real and within reach of nearly every business owner. What worked (or businesses got away with) for the past fifty years will not be effective moving forward. Delivering exceptional customer service is a differentiator in a competitive market. Seize the opportunity by hiring and retaining employees who can engage customer with the right skills and a positive attitude.