Customer Service Insight-Caring and Enjoyment
The mechanics and processes of great customer service are pretty easy to teach and train. Phone scripts, role playing with customer interactions, practice runs before opening and lengthy training programs all support this reinforcement. Unfortunately, the most predictive factor in great customer service is much more difficult to transfer knowledge to others.
There are two great indicators of customer service success and they are very hard to quantify and even harder to teach. Legitimate and sincere caring for customers and enjoyment in the interaction with the public are those factors. Regardless of the mechanics used, processes engaged or polices of an organization, these two trait sets will determine success or failure in a customer driven environment more than any other characteristic.
Customers are great barometers of these factors. They will often say things like “it didn’t sound like she cared” or “it felt like the conversation was forced” or even “he made me feel like I was an inconvenience.” All of those statements are indicators of lack of caring and lack of enjoyment by the customer contact professional. When the opposing statements from customers emerge such as “she made me feel special” or “he really loves his job” or “I felt like the most important customer” will often tell an organization that we have an extraordinary service provider.
In general terms, caring and interaction enjoyment cannot be taught and they are largely innate traits. However, an organization can certainly reinforce those behaviors and create an environment where those behaviors can flourish. One of the easiest reinforcement measures is balancing required production with the quality of interactions. Simply stated, reduce or modify the number of calls required, tables assigned or transactions needed to allow for a higher quality of customer interaction and to allow customer service professionals to care for customer needs without worrying about volume demands.
The other great reinforcing behavior for caring and having the gift of gab is a corporate cultural element. When team members and customer service professionals feel that they are cared for, they are much more likely to provide that caring to external customers. When supervisors, managers and leaders engage team members in relational conversation, they, likewise, become more likely to be relational with customers. This is a simple equation of treating team members how we need them to treat our customers.
The caring and enjoyment traits can also be recruited. Using job postings and advertisements that highlight the need for these skills is a start. Rather than emphasizing experience or education, fish for people who legitimately care and enjoy the company of other people. Beyond improved recruiting, the implementation of behavioral interviewing techniques that require a job candidate to describe and role play how they would respond to common customer service contacts. The candidate that easily applies empathy, understanding and provides apologies will be successful in caring for customers. Those candidates that offer short responses and launch into “fixing” mode too quickly will struggle caring for customer issues.
Another selection technique is emerging to target customer service success. Morphing from the group interview is the mass reception. This model invites all job candidates, many times upward of hundreds, to a reception or welcome type event. Hiring managers then evaluate, unknown to the candidates, how they are interacting. The job candidates that move effortlessly in the room and interact with a wide variety of people will have the social skills to enjoy working with customers. The wall flowers and those that shun the group interaction will generally struggle with customer contact.
You can’t teach it. You can’t really quantify it. But you sure know when you have someone that cares about customers and enjoys talking with them. So do your customers.
