Empowering Your Employees through Building a Legendary Service Culture
Last week, Henry talked about creating a service vision and communicating the service vision to employees regularly to build a legendary service culture in schools. Henry will share two additional suggestions for this week’s post.
Conduct a Customer Service Audit.
It is essential to conduct an objective customer service audit as it helps you identify areas for improvement and growth. There are two simple ways to do a customer service audit. Create and then use customer satisfaction surveys to find out what your internal and external customers think. As Henry was preparing for a job at a new school, the head of school revealed the challenges he would face because the service standards of the school had been regarded as less than good. Henry created a 100-day plan and made the reviewing of past customer satisfaction surveys a priority.
He was able to pinpoint the problem areas and identify the departments and offices that needed help. He worked hard at improving the service standards. He would not have known what or who to work on without the audits. In less than two years, he managed to raise the service standards of his support staff. The results from the customer satisfaction surveys with parents, teachers, and other staff members improved significantly. The majority of his departments and offices received more than a 90% customer satisfaction rating from parents and teachers. Three offices obtained 100% customer satisfaction over the next three consecutive years.
Here is another way to conduct an audit. Recruit a “secret shopper” to experience all the possible touchpoints from a parent and student perspective. These touchpoints are not just the reception lobby. It is also the security guardhouse, the parking lot, the school’s website, and students traveling by the school bus, the touchpoint is the bus driver or bus monitor. For students whose parents or a chauffeur drive them to school, it is the crossing guard. The “secret shopper” can be an employee, a consultant, or a friend. This person, however, must be highly observant and able to put themself in the shoes of a student, parent, or employee.
Provide Training for All Employees.
Training should NOT be a one-time event; it ought to be ongoing. You have probably heard of the 10-20-70 rule. What this rule says is that when you are learning something new and then developing it into a habit, 10% of it comes from formal training. Even though formal training and professional development opportunities are important, you need to take time to put what you have learned into practice and allow casual, informal learning moments to reinforce your learning, before cultivating it into a habit. Training should be ongoing coaching and one-on-one feedback with direct reports.
Customer service training ought to be conducted for every person in the school regardless of their role. Whether they are new hires or long-time employees; non-teaching staff or teachers; departmental heads or support staff; full-time staff or part-time; contractors or volunteers and frontline or backstage employees. This includes the finance people and inventory staff.
It is Henry’s opinion that the customer service training should be relevant to schools, as education is different from retail or other service organizations.
Customer service training content should include but not limited to building lasting relationships with parents and teachers, empathic and active listening, developing qualities that exhibit stellar customer service, creating memorable moments for parents and staff, techniques to deal with difficult situations that involve parents or teachers, customer profiling, and establishing positive first and last impressions.
If you are interested in knowing the customer service capacity of each individual employee, take another assessment. This one is for individual employees. Your teachers or staff members are welcome to take the customer service self-assessment at https://www.pdacademia.com/legendary-service-self-assessment. This assessment is also free. Anyone is welcome to take it!
There is an exciting cartoon of two working professionals discussing their corporate dilemma:
