3 Steps to improve poor Customer Service attitudes

By Cate Schreck - Service Excellence Coach

Customers from Melbourne to Mildura, Ballarat to Benalla and Geelong to Gippsland all want the same thing and they want it now - excellent customer service. For some customer service staff, providing this level of service is a joy. They genuinely love interacting with customers and would rather be out the front of the business than stuck behind the scenes. But there are other staff who seem to find customers just a bit, well, a bit of an interruption to an otherwise pretty good day.

It can be very tempting to ignore a poor customer service attitude, to cross your fingers and hope they will improve. Often we avoid addressing the situation because we personally find it challenging to discuss soft skill issues (people skills), especially if the employee is great in most, if not all other areas of their job.

How do you tell an employee their behaviour is causing problems? 

Frontline/Customer service staff can have bad moments or bad days, but as soon as you assess an ongoing customer service attitude problem, you must address it or you will eventually be spending time handling both customer and staff complaints.

What can you do to improve a poor customer service attitude?

Have Service Excellence Conversations.

1. No employees like to be surprised with a "come to my office' directive and your high performing customer service staff don't appreciate their excellent service skills being taken for granted. Schedule regular one to one Service Excellence Conversations where you can praise and share ideas on how they could do more, better, different or less in relation to providing excellent service. Allow the employee to also offer their ideas.
2. Make your Service Excellence Conversations productive by keeping note of specific instances that you deem as excellent as well as unsatisfactory. Allow the employee to ask questions and consider if there is a learning gap that can be filled with training. If you're having balanced and regular Service Excellence Conversations, there's no surprises.
3. Add Service Excellence to your Team Meeting agenda. Service Excellence is a team responsibility and should be viewed by everyone as a Work In Progress - never off the agenda.

A poor or inconsistent customers service attitude of an employee can have many reasons. Regular Service Excellence Conversations allows you to not only keep on top of how your customer service staff are feeling, but it confirms to everyone in the team just how valuable and important their customer service skills and attitudes are to you, the business and your customers.

Nothing sells and nothing satisfies employees and customers like a culture of service excellence.

Contact us now to book a time to complete your FREE Customer Service Analysis.