Think like a customer
Sometimes, even the most skilled employees need some steering when it comes to customer service.
“All these smart people we have here could pass the CPA exam, [but they] have never had a course in customer service,” Shamis says. “And what are they really doing? They’re servicing customers.”
So even if it seems like common sense, remind your employees how to treat their customers through training. After all, he says, “One of the fundamentals of having good customer service is to be able to teach people what customer service is.”
Shamis teaches an in-house course at SS&G designed to illustrate customer service from the perspectives of both the servers and the ones being served. He uses an industry study from the 1980s that surveyed both of those groups and backs that up with feedback from SS&G’s own clients.
He starts the training sessions by asking employees to list attributes of customer service. Their answers go up on a board and then everyone votes on a couple of defining characteristics.
But then Shamis unleashes the customer’s perception. And usually, the answers don’t match.
“A lot of times, people don’t look at it from a client’s expectation,” he says. “They try and define what quality is based upon what they think it is. … Most of the time, the professionals are looking at a good value proposition. Their [definitions] are more analytic and results-oriented.
“And then when you go to the client side, what you find out is they want phone calls returned timely and they want information to them on a timely basis. They’re more interested in the interaction.”
After employees see the gap between the two definitions, in what Shamis calls an aha moment, they begin paying closer attention. The next time they become the customer, they’ll be more aware of what separates good service from bad.
“It’s really something that’s just so simple,” Shamis says. “What we talk about is how do you like to be treated and what are your expectations and how does your experience of the way you’re treated correlate with the way you should treat your customers.”
Even companies with established service education programs often fail to include this simple role-playing in their approach, souring their whole service philosophy.
“I think they fail mainly because they don’t put themselves in the customer’s shoes,” Shamis says. “[It’s] basically asking myself, ‘Well, if I was a customer, how would I like to be treated?’”
He has also taught his course for other firms. If you’re just developing an educational element for customer service at your company, begin by checking with others in your industry to see whether they can help you launch your program.
For the second half of service training, Shamis takes all 425 employees from every office on an annual retreat. The topics rotate every year between the company’s three cultural elements: service, growth and employee-centricity.
Look for local experts on the topic to speak at your retreat. In some cases, you might be able to stretch the value of these sources by having them speak more intimately with the senior leadership before they present to the entire company.
