This is a short blog by a consultant who has handled service delivery sessions for numerous companies over a 10 year period. The feedbacks that have trailed our sessions have ranged from that of splendor to somewhat bland. After about half a decade of practice, my consortium reviewed all the post-consultancy feedback especially on customer service delivery. There were findings out of which this piece would share a couple of them.
Our study confirmed some critical concepts that are very prevalent in the business world but rarely put in practice as implementation could involve some level of work.
The first concept is that if a business fails to continually measure and reward the desirable attitudes, it cannot embed those attitudes into the fabric of the organisation as a culture. The implication here is that once customer service training is delivered, there needs to be a system that measures how trained staffs are practicing the intended outcomes. The step for the organisation is to embed the entire service expectation into the existing performance management system in place. If there is none in place, it will be a great opportunity to have one. Performance management systems are known to be one of the ways to help bring out the best attitudes in staff. If excellent customer service is desired, then it has to be measured and the employee rewarded when they live the philosophy, guided when they fall short and punished or even sacked when an employee falls short consistently.
Other factors like motivation through showing keen interest in staff’s development and the mode of recruitment are known to directly influence the attitudes of staff. If staff knows that institution is interested in their person, it creates a great platform for behaviour changes through training and the results are usually exponential. Of course it is every consultant’s joy to be able to count a client’s success through the service they rendered. The employer would need to have policies that seem to hold employees’ development in high esteem especially if staffs are mainly young people building their career.
Finally, the mode of recruitment has been seen to play a very important role in forming the general attitudes of a work place. It is worthy to create the environment that makes it an opportunity for one to work there. No one employee should be made to go through the rudiments of recruitment as a mere formality. Great if they came through the door by reference but a grievous error if they are handed a place merely because of the reference. Such practice waters down on the mind-set of holding their role in utmost accountability and high performance. Usually management spends more resources making such an individual productive and therefore no amount of training can correct it.
Train at all cost, but don’t train in vaccum.
By: Yaw Korankyi Antwi || www.ghanatalksbusiness.com
