Customer Focus - Voice - Top 10 Training Topics

The Top 10 Training Topics for Customer FocusTraining is profoundly strategic. It is a process aimed at improving the single most important resource in the organization: people. Nothing has more of an impact on customer loyalty than the behaviors and competencies of your people. Training is the most effective way to communicate the correct behaviors and competencies that will keep customers coming back.At its core, training is very straightforward: figure out what competencies are required for personnel to effectively serve their customers, and take action to address gaps in competency. The challenge comes in trying to build the system that will deliver on this. With good intentions, organizations often build unwieldy systems that are confusing and wh ich are doomed to failure. That’s why your training process must be carefully designed, with an eye toward relevance, simplicity, and customer expectations.Let’s start with an understanding of the starting point for training, which is competency. Competence is the ability to apply what you know (knowledge) and what you can do (skills) in a job situation. In other words, it’s the condition that enables someone to successfully drive customer loyalty. There are countless topics on which employees can be trained, but resources for training are finite. Organizations must choose the critical few training topics that drive customer focus and the organization’s long term success. What are these topics? Here are ten of the most critical:1.The organization’s mission and strategy: The mission is an organization’s corereason for existence. We’ve already decided that the core reason for anorganization’s existence is serving its customers. Employees need to understand this fact in no uncertain terms. The message needs to come from the highest levels of the organization in order to reinforce its credibility.Strategy defines exactly how the organization is going to deliver on its mission. Many organizations treat their strategies as big secrets. The only problem with sec rets is that they aren’t good communication tools. If employees are going to help drive the organizations strategy (which they must in order for it to work), then they have to understand exactly what the strategy is. Pick the relevant pieces of the strateg y as they relate to individual’s roles within the organization. When the strategy clearly focuses on customers and their expectations, its relevancebecomes obvious to everyone.2.How to present a professional appearance and attitude: Professionalism is anattribute that has become rarer and rarer. How many times have you beendisgusted by the appearance and attitude of someone by whom you were supposed to be served? It’s an almost daily occurrence. Disgusting and disinterestedemployees are among the biggest liabilities that an organization can possess.The best way to let employees understand how they should look and act is to provide explicit guidelines. Don’t leave it up to individual’s powers of creativity and interpretation; give them clear rules for dress and behavior. Then enforce the rules consistently for all organizational members.3.Handling customer complaints: Even in the best organizations, customerssometimes complain. The fact that customers complain is not nearly as important as how the organization deals with the complaints. All employees who have evena remote chance of receiving a customer complaint should receive training thatlet’s them know how to record the complaint, what kind of details to capture,where the complaint should go after being recorded, and how to empathize with the customer in an appropriate manner. Nothing makes customers irate likeemployees who don’t know how to handle their complaints. This kind ofignorance only makes a bad situation much worse. On the other hand, employees who are trained in handling complaints can diffuse potential disasters and build customer loyalty.4.Effective communication: Communication is one of the weakest competencieswithin organizations. It is also a weakness that has an enormous impact oncustomer loyalty and satisfaction. When employees can’t communicate clearly, problems are bound to happen: customer requirements are lost, messages aremuddled, information is misinterpreted, and people inevitably get angry. It iscategorically impossible to breed customer loyalty when employees can’tcommunicate effectively.Employees should receive training on the types of communication most appropriate to their customer interactions. These include the following:Listening skills: This is possibly the weakest link in thecommunication formula. Simply put, most people like to talk but fewlike to listen. Organizational members need to understand thatlistening to customers, and really understanding what they’re saying, isabsolutely critical.∙Non-verbal communication: The way somebody stands, sits, andmoves often convey much more than words. Training should includeguidance on appropriate non-verbal communication.∙Proper use of language: English is a constantly evolving language.Despite this fact, there should still be very clear guidelines for howemployees speak and the kind of words they use. Language to beavoided at all costs includes slang, street rap, profanity, off-colorhumor, derogatory remarks, and political rants.∙Written communication: As hard as verbal and non-verbalcommunication is, written communication is even harder. One of thereasons it’s so difficult is that written words are often misinterpreted.Written communication must be carefully constructed, with an eyetoward simplicity and brevity. Employees must get plenty ofopportunities to practice writing skills, along with feedback on theeffectiveness of their writing.5.Time management: Failure to manage time means that customer will not beserved. This fact is unavoidable. Despite this certainty, organizations rarelyprovide guidance on how employees can best use their time. Much to the contrary, organizations tend to build bureaucracies that ensure that employees will fail to use their time effectively. Some of the keys to time management include planning each day in advance, prioritization of tasks, avoidance of activities that distract from priorities, meetings that are brief and timely, and information provided at thepoint of use. The removal of non-work related temptations, such as unlimitedinternet surfing and chatting with friends on the telephone, also assists with time management. A little bit of oversight usually goes a long way.6.Root cause analysis: The ability to investigate a problem and identify its rootcause is critical to customer loyalty. After all, most customers are willing to endue occasional problems if the organization aggressively attacks their causes andprevents recurrence. Inability to address the root cause guarantees customerdefections.Everyone in the organization should receive training on problem solving, root cause analysis, and the use of simple analytical tools. I’m not talking about six sigma here, just basic tools that enable everyone to contribute to problemresolution. After receiving training, they need the opportunity to practice.Effective root cause analysis is a skill that rarely comes naturally.7.Safety: Why should customers care if your employees are safe? Because a lack ofsafety delays processes, causes defects, and drives up costs. Ultimately, a lack of safety will doom the organization. Training employees to work in a safe manner may not ensure customer loyalty, but a lack of safety will certainly negatively impact it over the long term.8.Business ethics: Remember all those fundamentals that everyone learned inkindergarten? Well, not everybody learned them. You know the things I’m talking about: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, play nice. These principles can belumped into a category called business ethics. Over the last couple of decades, the notion of ethics has seemed quaint and outmoded to some organizations. Theirattitude seems to be, “We’re here to succeed, and we’re going to do anything it takes to be number one.” Never mind if that results in unethical and sometimes illegal behavior.Unethical behavior can destroy an organization. Reputable customers do not want to associate with organizations that bend rules and violate acceptedstandards of conduct. Training of employees should include specific guidelines on ethical p ractices, with lots of examples that people can relate to. Then it’s up to top management to model ethical behavior in their day to day activities. Years of ethics training can be undone in a matter of minutes when organizationalmembers see that their leaders do not practice what they preach.9.How to propose improvement ideas: Organizations are full of creative people.They’re always discovering new and improved ways of doing things. You don’t even have to ask people to find improvements; they’ll generally do it on their own.What the organization does have to do is provide a way to communicate andstandardize improvements. One person with an excellent method is nice, but when that excellent method has been adopted by everyone it has enormous implications.Suggestion systems are one way to formally solicit people’s ideas forimprovement (for information on suggestion systems, refer to “The ContinualImprovement Process: From Strategy to the Bottom Line” 2004, Paton Press). A simple open-door policy can also be a tool for organizational members tocommunicate their ideas to leadership. Whatever the method, train employees to seek improvements and how to communicate them once they’re found. And make sure they think about improvements from the perspective of their customers.10.Document control: This may seem like an unusual training topic to drive customerfocus. Document control has a huge impact on customer loyalty, though. It is aprocess that is invisible to most customers, but they are directly impacted by itseffectiveness. Think about how many errors results from someone having thewrong specification, requirements, order, or instruction. Having the correctinformation is nothing more than document control. All employees should receive training on the organi zation’s process for document control, including howdocuments can be revised, who approves revisions, where the current versions of documents are located, and what to do with obsolete documents.These ten topics are by no means the only training issues that impact the customer. Depending on the nature of your organization, there may be others. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and think about the kinds of training you would expect organizational members to have. Even better, ask a few customers about the kind of training they would like to see you provide your people. The ideas they provide might surprise you. Keep the training focused on issues that affect the customer and you can never go very far off course.About the authorCraig Cochran is a project manager with Georgia Tech’s Economic Development Institute. He’s an RAB-certified QMS lead auditor and the author of “Customer Satisfaction: Tools, Techniques and Formulas for Success” and “The ContinualImprovement Process: From Strategy to the Bottom Line,” both available from Paton Press (). CISQ can be reached at (404) 894-0968 or on the Web at .。