Customer Service needs intelligence
Our experience has taught us that many conventional service training courses are of little effect. They concentrate on shaping behaviour rather than attitudes. The effect seldom lasts, and old habits are hard to change. Most damaging are generic customer service course that can, in no way, account for the needs and challenges unique to organisations and individuals. Good service doesn't need training, it needs intelligence.
For employees to provide engaging service, they must firstly have a good understanding of themselves or ‘personal intelligence’. Personal intelligence allows employees to understand their own attitudes and responses to different situations. Are they defensive, insecure or angry? How do they feel about customers and their relationships with them? Through an understanding of their own attitudes and behaviour, employees are better equipped to communicate authentically with others.
They also need to understand what they do and how they fit into the organisational structure. We call this ‘organisational intelligence’. They must know who customers are and what specific needs and wants they expect the company to satisfy.
Employees need to understand their own brand and to affirm a personal interest in the brand promise. For instance, in one company, employees were avoiding ‘difficult’ customer because they had to enforce a sales strategy clause in their contracts which they didn’t feel was wholly fair. Fortunately, the CEO, committed to the customer service drive, immediately agreed to hear their concerns, to enforce changes to address them and encouraged staff to exercise personal discretion. This marked an important shift because employees were now an authentic part of their brand, able to define their brand promise in line with their own sensibilities.
A third intelligence required by employees is ‘professional intelligence’. This includes a range of professional skills used in their communication and interaction with others - practical techniques for communicating electronically, in writing and orally.
Even these skills don’t lend themselves to generic training because communication strategies are dependent on organisational culture. Every organisation must develop professional skills that reflect their own style. Traditional airline employees need to be formal and conventional in their communication, as would be their style of dressing. They must be polite, but their tone must reassure passengers and customers on a number of levels. IT engineers are different. They need to engage and communicate on an appropriate technical level, but a more casual approach and style may work better.
In the following blog we examine our approach to developing these Intelligences to improve both internal and external customer service.