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Speaking with existing and new clients about developing their customer facing service team, we cover a lot of subjects, grouped into two key areas: Behaviour and Commercial.
First - Behaviour. Here, amongst other touch points, we focus on:
A. How the service team represents the brand.
B. Developing the service team to use good language and getting rid of the bad language.
C. How to give customers (and colleagues) bad news.
D. How to handle angry customers (or colleagues).
E. How to bring a service conversation back to the facts, i.e., deal with facts and dates, not opinions and emotions.
Second - Commercial / Growing the Service Business. In this area, we focus on engaging and motivating the client’s entire customer facing personnel to actively promote their service products in the right way, at the right time, using the right language.
Our programs have been shown to have tremendous impact in many areas. The biggest one, however, that was not originally envisioned. Our programs help reduce the Silly Stuff.
Today service leaders are wearing 2, 3 or 4 different hats and juggling multiple priorities across their own and their customers’ businesses. Economic pressures and drives to improve business efficiency have resulted in a dramatic reduction in support and assistance to these leaders to manage the day-to-day details.
With these two key challenges very much in mind, the most satisfying response to Catalyst Global Service Excellence programs is how they simply reduce, and in many cases virtually eliminate, the Silly Stuff:
Someone using bad (or lazy) language.
Someone not making the 2-minute phone call between service and sales, before and after the installation.
Someone escalating a question or issue when they could manage it themselves, by looking left and right, gathering facts and using the right language.
We always stress to the customer facing teams who participate in our programs, that you do not want to be quoted in meetings where you are not present, or be quoted in emails or text chains that you are not copied in. Have the courageous conversations now, not later and resolve issues at the source backed up with facts and data.
If you ask any leader or manager, not only in service, “What is your most precious resource?” the answer will be “time.” Reducing the Silly Stuff gives back blocks of that precious resource, allowing managers to work on the business, not in the business. They can spend time conducting proactive service reviews with customers, thereby contributing to the growth of their business, rather than being swamped daily fighting fires fanned by the Silly Stuff.
With workloads only increasing and the “do more with less” mantra being pushed to the limit, reducing the Silly Stuff in service is critical.
Tony Kenney
CEO
CATALYST Global Global Marketing, Training and Communication Programs
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