If you have ever worked in a front line customer service job for more than a few months, you will almost certainly have been on some sort of customer service training course. Depending on who you were working for, it might have been delivered by your manager or supervisor, or a trainer who worked for your company. If you were really lucky, you might have been sent away for a day to be trained ‘properly’ by a professional training company. Most large companies that have front line people serving their customers for them, such as in public transport, retail, leisure and hospitality ‘do’ customer service training every three or four years. It comes up on a ‘rota’, a bit like health and safety training or regulatory training, and the well-meaning people in the training department (I know, I used to be one) usually re-hash the training that was delivered three or four years ago and put everyone through it again. When I say ‘everyone’, I mean all the front line customer service professionals who spend their daily working lives serving customers. Sometimes their team leaders and supervisors go with them.
The training is usually excellent. Trainers are usually quite bubbly and supportive people (well, the sort that do customer service training are), and everyone comes out of the session feeling motivated and enthusaistic about going back to work and really making a difference to their customers. I know, I have been on courses like that and have also designed, re-hashed and delivered them!
So why don’t they work? Well, I can hear you saying, they do work, for a short time. I agree, they often do work, for a short time. Customer complaints reduce, quite often employee sickness and absence drops for a while, sometimes sales even increase for a time, and then, within two or three months, sometimes less, everything goes back to how it was before the training happened. Why is that? Well, I have a theory!
To illustrate my theory, I’m going to tell you a story. Some people I know work for a railway company. Last year, they had a big change in the service specification on board their trains, and the management thought it would be a great opportunity to put everyone through a customer service training course. All the guards, catering crews, station and ticket office people went off on a one-day course that was going to transform the service on the trains. I travel on that line quite often, and I noticed there were more front line people around on the stations, they were carrying themselves as if they were proud to work there, customers were being greeted as they got on and off trains and there was definitely a better atmosphere about the place for a while. Then, after a few weeks, it all gradually started to drop off and go back to ‘normal’. I had a chat with one of the guys that I know and asked him why he thought that was.
‘Well’ , he said, ‘it’s all very well sending us all on a customer service course. You come away feeling all fired up, but then after a few weeks you realise that it’s only you that’s changed. Your manager still speaks to you sas if you were a piece of dirt, you still have equipment that doesn’t work, you are still having to explain to passengers why you haven’t got stuff that’s on the menu, so after a few weeks you feel less motivated and more angry, and I suppose you lose heart a bit’. His words, not mine, but I can totally empathise because I have walked in his shoes, many times.
So what’s the answer? Well, part of it is that for customer service to work in any organisation, large or small, everyone has to be responsible for it, whether it be the cleaner or the Managing Director. And as soon as behaviour change is restricted to a certain level within the business, that organisation is restricting it’s own ability to change and deliver great service to it’s customers. There is no easy way, a customer service culture has to go right through an organisation, and putting front line people through a training course every three or four years is not going to achieve that. What that does is create employees who are less motivated to deliver great service than they were in the first place. The real answer is complete culture change within the business, from top to bottom. That creates pain, often for senior and middle managers, who have to change their behaviour, so many organisations shy away from it. The only way to change that, in my experience, is to go around lighting little ‘customer service fires’, and keep them burning. That’s what I did, and that’s what I still do!