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Culture Shift: The Better Alternative to Customer Service Training
June 16, 2008
We all know customer service training doesn't work so well—we see reminders of it every day. But what other choices do we have?
By Paul Levesque
According to the well-known saying, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Businesses continue to pour money into customer service training for their employees, even when the results are consistently disappointing. Insanity? Or is it desperation—the painful combination of "we have to do something" with "anybody got any better ideas?"
But, as it turns out, some businesses do have a better idea. Their approach costs less and produces dramatically positive results. More importantly for your organization, however, it's also a fun way to promote teamwork and cultural alignment.
Customer Service vs. Customer Focus
The tragic flaw in virtually all traditional customer service training is that it's designed to "fix the employees." The designers of such training begin by targeting certain key behaviors employees in service-oriented businesses exhibit on the job. They then create exercises or role plays in which trainees get to "practice" behaving this same way in the classroom.
This has always struck me as the equivalent of a doctor treating groups of insomnia patients by getting them to close their eyes, hang their heads limply and practice snoring and drooling. Even if the classroom simulation looks completely believable, it doesn't mean anything much is likely to change back in the real world. In fact, even more negative behavior tends to take place. Workers often resent the way that corporate service training implies they're the cause of the problem, and jeeringly refer to it as "smile training." (That phrase reminds me of the annoying school choir leader of my youth, who during public performances spent more time pushing up the corners of her mouth with her index fingers—her wordless way of imploring us to smile—than she did actually directing the music. It just somehow never occurred to her that if she made such performances more exuberant and enjoyable for the singers, the smiles would take care of themselves.)
But what the training designers never mention is that those "key behaviors" they build into their sessions are typically only exhibited by workers in businesses that already have a strong service culture. The employees themselves do not behave that way because they were trained to do so—they do it because their culture makes it a satisfying and rewarding part of working there.
The emphasis in such businesses is not on fixing employees to make them better deliverers of customer service: it's on fixing the culture to create a stronger customer focus across all levels of the operation.
That last sentence is worth re-reading. It spells out the major difference between the handful of flashpoint businesses that dominate their markets and everybody else. It explains why improving the customer experience is a preoccupation for all employees in these businesses, not just for those who interact directly with customers. It clarifies how these organizations achieve total cultural alignment toward their primary single objective of customer satisfaction (their "One Most Important Thing," as I've described in an earlier column).
The Better Alternative
How do such businesses "fix their culture" to make it more customer-focused? They replace training (which signals that the employees are messing up, and that management has all the answers to make things right) with group brainstorming sessions (that convey it's the workers themselves who have the best answers when it comes to understanding customer needs and expectations).
The motivational power in this kind of employee brainstorming lies in the elements of ownership and involvement. Instead of management dictating what it expects employees to do to satisfy customers (and then attempting the near-impossible task of enforcing these behaviors), the employees generate ideas of their own to delight customers. The irony is that even if the ideas are the same—for example, even if the employees hit on the idea that customers would like it if they "smiled more"—the simple fact that it's their own idea changes everything.
Waste no more money on customer service training. Instead, get your workers generating their own strategies to delight customers—and discover how big a difference this kind of culture shift can make.
Culture Shift Extra: "Imagine my surprise and delight when 1,000 frontline employees came up with 5,000 new ways to surprise and delight their guests." These words, spoken several years ago, are from Mike Johnson, the then managing director of the T.G.I.Friday's restaurant chain across the UK. It had been my happy assignment to train all 23 of his store managers in the mechanics of my Customer Focus Process, a facilitated brainstorming process designed to get teams of employees coming up with their own creative ideas for improving the customer experience (There's a summary of the actual process in this week's podcast). The 5,000 fresh ideas were generated by teams of workers in the chain's 23 restaurants, after each team went through a single half-day session facilitated by their respective managers.
 Editor's Note: How would an employee Customer Focus brainstorming session be structured? How would ideas be captured and preserved? The answers are spelled out step-by-step in this week's Culture Shift podcast, "The Better Alternative to Customer Service Training."
We want to hear your feedback on "Culture Shift" columns! Send comments to stacy.straczynski@nielsen.com to let us know what topics you'd like discussed in upcoming episodes of the "Culture Shift."
INCENTIVE online "Culture Shift" columnist Paul Levesque is the author of five books, including "Customer Service Made Easy" and "Motivation," both from Entrepreneur Press. He's a seminar leader and public speaker with two decades' experience as an international business consultant specializing in the connection between employee motivation and customer satisfaction.
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