Is Investing in a Customer Service Training Workshop Right for Your Organization?

By: Mary Kay Elfman
November 29th, 2011

Addressing deficiencies in the areas of skills performance, feedback, measurement and rewards, and resources may be the fastest road to improved customer service at little or no cost, according to Mary Kay Elfman, Insperity’s Training and Development Director. Before you invest in customer service training for your employees, ask yourself a few key questions:

• Does your team know what is expected of them in terms of customer service skills? If you are hiring new employees, or you have determined that a lack of skill or knowledge among existing employees is the problem, then an investment in training is worth considering.
• Are you providing regular feedback to reinforce desirable behaviors and correcting those that are less desirable? Customer service training is a valuable tool for new hires and existing employees alike, but so too is your commitment to holding your team accountable to your organization’s standards of excellence. By acting as a coach and mentor to your team on an ongoing basis, you will reinforce desirable behaviors and ensure continued customer satisfaction.
• Do you measure and reward excellent customer service? Measurement goes hand-in-hand with rewarding excellent customer service.  Having key measures in place, such as client satisfaction ratings, number of customer complaints received, or turnaround times to resolve issues will prove to helpful in rewarding best practices.
• Do your employees have the tools and resources they need to meet and exceed your expectations? A carpenter can’t work properly with a plumber’s tools.  Evaluate whether your team is equipped with the appropriate resources to interact with and service clients.  Improvements to performance may be realized with only a few simple adjustments in your customer service toolkit.

Several factors play into a successful customer training program. Understanding how each is practiced in your organization will go a long way in determining a need for additional training in order to further advance customer satisfaction.

About Mary Kay Elfman

Mary K. Elfman, CPT serves as Director, Training and Development with Insperity, where she leads the Training and Development Center of Excellence, Virtual Learning Center and the instructional design function.  She has over 20 years of experience in human resources, training and performance improvement, and is recognized as a Certified Performance Technologist (CPT) by the International Society of Performance Improvement.

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