Building The Business Case For Customer Service, Part 2

This is the second in a series of posts about building a customer service training course. (Part 1 here.) Even if you’re not interested in building a training course, your employees should have a clear understanding of why it’s important to deliver superior customer service and how that delivery or nondelivery impacts your business goals (or your mission if you’re a non profit.).

If your organization has conducted any kind of branding image, customer satisfaction, or has metrics around customer feedback, consider incorporating some of those stats into your business case. My organization focused on “The Four ‘R’s:’”

• Retention-How superior customer service impacts loyalty
• Referrals-How happy customers/constituents are more likely to refer people to us
• Reputation-How superior customer service creates positive word of mouth advertising
• Revenue-How all of the above impacts revenue (or how the lack of effective customer service negatively impacts revenue.

Create Strong Learning Objectives And Stick To Them

For those of you building a course, early on you should clearly state its learning objectives. As you build the course, each key point should be tied back to one or more of these objectives. If not, you either have poorly designed learning objectives or you may be throwing in needless information. Information not tied to your objectives can result in sections that are boring and irrelevant to the learner. That’ll give them an excuse to tune you out.

People Taking The Course Are Your Customers

Remember, you’re trying to change your employees’ behavior to be more customer-centric. The employees who will be taking this course are your customers. You must walk the walk as you create the course. Therefore, be sure you keep your employees’ needs front and center as you create the course. In the end you should be practicing the same principles and techniques in building and delivering this course that you advocate they follow.

Define Key Terms

You’ll also want to be sure you define any jargon early on in the presentation, especially if you will be delivering it to newly-hired employees. Make sure everyone is on the same page.

Think of the courses you’ve taken. Can you remember one where the instructor got off to a poor start and you tuned out the rest of the session? Don’t let that happen to you.

Regards,

Glenn

Follow me on Twitter. I’m txglennross