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Have you ever wondered how some companies are able to provide incredible customer service and others struggle to do so? Performance indicators are important, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is that it is difficult to achieve the goal of service excellence for your customers if your service team does not feel valued.
Service leaders continually focus on delivering the best experience for their customers, and typically invest heavily in training and tools to equip their teams for success. While these are necessary actions, one thing that is often overlooked is the personal relationship you have with individual members across your service organization.
Set the tone
Teams look to their leaders for direction and support, and every interaction a leader has with them leaves a lasting impression. The importance of positive interactions is crucial to building a strong team culture. You must invest the time on relationship building across your team because it creates a foundation of trust. Without trust in their leadership, and peers, teams falter and the ones who suffer the most are your customers.
Service leaders often spend more time focusing on timelines, budgets, metrics, and other strategic initiative planning that their teams are left to connect the dots. If you want your service team to achieve the highest level of success and delivery, it is critical that you make the time to ensure they understand what is expected of them, are on board with your vision, and you provide direct opportunities for them to seek clarity.
Align the team
Here's an example. We launched a Digital Employee Experience SaaS platform which provided a unique opportunity to completely transform the way we provided support to our customers. My team was accustomed to the traditional omni-channel model where a customer in need of support contacts us reactively through the various channels available. With this transformational shift, we built the foundation for a proactive outreach model. The team would now reach out to our customers as issues were detected, and often unnoticed by our customers.
Imagine as a customer rather than facing downtime and lost productivity having to navigate the traditional support channels, you receive a call from the team proactively to resolve your issue. The team is now armed with information specific to the issue enabling them to provide a quicker resolution and a far better overall support experience.
Exciting stuff, but in order to reach this goal we had to build a robust change management plan for the team. This was not a one size fits all model, and was tailored and communicated to different members of the team based on how they would be using the features of the tool. We used this personalized interaction as an opportunity to reinforce the value it would bring both to them and our customers. This was a crucial step to getting everyone aligned. During this conversation we also got the team really excited about the tool, and it worked.
Clarify purpose
With the advent of AI and improved self-help solutions, support teams have raised valid concerns about their future role in the organization. Addressing these concerns head on, and tailored to specific roles across the team, goes a long way towards helping them better understand these new technologies. It also helps clarify how they both fit into the organization.
We’ve all used AI and self-help solutions, and they are great at providing customers with quick answers and resolutions to more routine issues. The challenge is they don’t always understand context, or empathy. There is nothing more frustrating than running in circles trying to get to an actual human when the technology is not providing the answer or solution needed. The customer experience quickly suffers as a result.
The better solution, I believe, is a blend of the two. Leverage the right forward-thinking tools to automate and provide quick resolutions to more common issues, and build an empowered and high performing service team to tackle more advanced issues paired with human emotions and empathy. This also opens up more opportunities for continual learning and career pathing for the team, and creating subject matter expert areas focused on problem management, trend analysis, automation opportunities, and proactive customer outreach.
It’s so important to make the time to articulate this to the members of your service team, and reinforce the importance of their roles and the level of service they provide. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the latest and greatest new technology, and there is certainly a place for it in your service organization, but if you truly want to achieve service excellence, you must make sure your team understands their role and reinforce how important they are to the overall customer experience.
Personalize conversations
That sounds great, but what happens if members of the team are still unclear or need further validation? That’s where a more personalized and direct conversation may be required. As service leaders we do our best to articulate our vision broadly in a clear and concise manner, but everyone processes information in their own way.
This is why it’s so critical to really get to know the members of your team, understand how they individually process information, and what motivates them. Doing so will help ensure they are clear on how specifically they are contributing to the goals of the organization, empower and set them up for greater success, and best position the team towards the ultimate goal of delivering service excellence for your customers.
I recognize and appreciate that many leaders run large organizations, often with hundreds or thousands of team members. Many also run smaller teams, which makes it easier to connect with their teams on an individual level. For the latter group, make the most of that opportunity. For the larger teams, it is so important to spend time with your leadership team and fully understand their management styles. You may think your message is being filtered down, but it is up to you to validate that, and work with your leaders if it’s not translating effectively.
I’ve always set the tone across my organizations that anyone can talk to anyone, and any member of my team can reach out to me directly. I make time for everyone, and ensure my leaders follow suit. Some of the most productive conversations I’ve had are with my team members on the front line of support. These interactions are invaluable.
Pop in to say 'hello'
An example of a simple action I’ve found so successful in building relationships across my team are informal and unscheduled pop ins to see how they’re doing. If in person isn’t an option, send them a quick Slack or Teams message. As leaders rise the ranks in their careers and assume increased responsibilities taking up much of their time, it is easy to get disconnected from your most valued team members. These are the folks who are on the front lines doing much of the heavy lifting.
Use these important opportunities to express your appreciation for the hard work they do every day to help make the team successful. You’d be amazed how much of a positive impact this simple action contributes to morale, and your team will appreciate the gesture more than you can imagine.
Another added benefit is that I frequently learn about things I may have never known had I not checked in. I may be made aware of an unhappy customer I could make a follow up call to and help the team diffuse a situation, a process that wasn’t working that I could help fix, or even a challenge a team member is facing that I could offer guidance and direction on. I purposely visit without an agenda to encourage open conversation. Sometimes it’s personal in nature, sometimes it’s professional, but it’s always meaningful and positive.
Invest the time
Building strong relationships with your service team takes work and initiative. If you invest the time to really get to know your people you will better understand what motivates them. Once you know this, you can tailor your approach to what will work best to help them align with your vision. Be sure to actively listen to what they have to say, validate and acknowledge their contributions, and most importantly follow through with action to help them with whatever they need.
Strong personal relationships build a culture of trust and the added benefit is that your team will be inspired and motivated to do their best work in servicing your customers. The road to service excellence starts with your team. I wish you all success on your service journeys.