You may well find that you have staff who are competent on the phone with customers, but that they’re conversing in a way that doesn’t fit with your values. This often happens when staff have been in the same role for a long time and have become a little complacent, operating on auto-pilot, engaging with customers without really being engaged! At this point, achieving customer satisfaction is not something that comes naturally and it certainly can’t be faked, because acting like a true brand ambassador isn’t about ability, it’s about attitude, and you can’t fake a genuine desire to deliver remarkable customer service if you’re not in the right headspace!
It’s important that your company’s values are properly communicated and embraced at all levels, supported by first-rate customer service classes and telesales training. You may have a mission statement in place, but are your brand values stated in terms that can be relayed on the front line?
During your customer service training, you should create a list of values that everyone within your organisation can buy into, along with strap-lines that explain exactly what the value means to each representative in the organisation. For example, if one of your values is “We treat every customer as an individual”, the strap-line might read “We communicate with them in the way they prefer rather than reading from a script”.
All your values have to be modelled by management outside of programmes to improve customer care and employee motivation, so that staff experience them ‘living and breathing’ from the top down and appreciate how to apply them to everything they do. This may mean a serious change in your company’s culture, in which case you need to get all staff involved with your values from the outset and enable everyone to take ownership in order to deliver them. This way, staff will be genuinely engaged with the brand, as opposed to just following the rules – and this will be reflected in their customer interactions on the front line.
