Customer service with a difference

The position

Our client has millions of customers who use their transport service everyday. Providing a reliable service is difficult and you have all the ingredients for the customers from hell – tired, frustrated, stressed out and having paid good money for a season ticket.

And the 800 staff who have to deal with them? They’re keen to provide good service, but, like many other employees in the front line, they too are stressed and can sometimes feel unsupported.

So, no wonder, as the number of customer complaints rose, senior management decided that something had to be done.

How did we tackle it?

It was a tough brief, for all the reasons mentioned above. And we only had a day with each group of ten. Crucially, we involved a senior manager at the beginning of each workshop to give the customers’ feedback and to stress the importance of customer service to the future of the company. We also involved the group’s manager for the day. The programme concentrated on two aspects: identifying what prevented staff from being able to provide good service, and what great customer service really meant.

For the first topic, they worked in groups and came up with specific issues and solutions. For the second, we put them into groups of 3, gave them £5, and sent them off to the various coffee outlets nearby – Macdonalds, a local cafe, supermarket, Starbucks – to buy a cup of coffee. The brief was to take a long hard look at the service they received, what worked and what didn’t and to bring this back to the main group and look at the implications for their work with customers. That worked really well. Then we also used actors in customer scenarios we’d researched. This enabled staff to practise dealing with difficult clients and situations that they typically face everyday in a safe environment. They could try out different ways of handling clients and get feedback form the rest of the group about how well it worked which was a powerful way to drive the message home.

What did it achieve?

The client regularly surveys customers. Over the two periods following the training, complaints were down by a significant number and complaints about staff conduct also went down. The client attributed this directly to the training.

• Staff were better able to deal with customers, even in a crisis.
• They were more aware of the customers’ need for information, politely given.
• Most of the managers followed their action plans and took practical steps which improved customers’ perceptions.

Email Lucy Neale or phone 0117 315 5243.