Delivering excellent customer service should be the focus of your business and at the forefront of your team’s minds. In order to support and encourage your teams they need to be continuously reminded of the importance of service delivery excellence. You can do this by using different communication channels ranging from on the job coaching to team briefings or Customer Service Training in the form of Customer Service Workshops.
I’d like to share an exercise from one of our Customer Journey Workshops that is very well received.
Teams are asked to think of a word beginning with each letter of the alphabet from A – Z that links to providing excellent Customer Service. I advise teams while they are completing the A-Z to think of examples of when they personally delivered great service and to identify what they did that made it so great. I add a timeframe which makes it challenging yet fun and make sure I have a completed A-Z just like the one below so that I can add to teams responses afterwards:-
A = Attentive
B = Body Language
C = Communication
D = Delight
E = Empathy
F = First Impressions
G = Gestures
H = Honesty
I = Interaction
J = Journey
K = Knowledge
L = Listening
M =Memorable
N = Needs
O = Open
P = Positive
Q = Quality
R = Respect
S = Smile
T = Tone
U = Understanding
V = Valued
W = Welcome
X = Xcellent
Y = YOU
Z = Zest
What is interesting is that often the feedback afterwards is that people initially thought it would be too simple when actually they found it quite difficult as they really had to think about it.
A – Z of Customer Service can be used as either a quick fire round in a team briefing/meeting or a more detailed session where both a response and an example relating to an experience in the workplace are required. To go one step further you could make the exercise more interesting by asking teams to think of not one but perhaps 3 words for each letter with a small prize such as sweets for the team that finishes first.
This is an excellent exercise to do with YOUR teams to get them to really focus on the entire Customer Experience and essential behaviours and qualities in order to deliver customer service excellence.
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us we are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work, he is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business, he is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him, he is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so” Mahatma Gandhi