Running a Customer Service Training Meeting: An Agenda for Success

Many who plan company meetings wear multiple hats in the office. Besides responsibility for planning the tactical details of company's meetings, many of you may also have to come up with an exciting and informative agenda or a topic for discussion. For your internal staff meetings, you should focus on customer service several times a year, since it is one of the most important topics for today's companies in their quest for success and profitability.

If you think about it, many of your company's customers, prospective customers, or recruits may not see huge differences between the products or services of your company and those of your competitors. Your prices may be similar, the areas or industries you serve may be similar, and your product features or services may be similar. So the best way to differentiate your company is through your delivery of products and services. This means customers or recruits need to have a satisfying experience when dealing with your company.

Customer service allows you to stand out from the crowd, and it's important that everyone in your organization understands what customer service means and how to deliver it. To keep customer service at the top of the minds of your team, consider a series of staff meetings that focus on topics related to delivering exceptional service. The following five factors are the most critical for any customer service program, and each topic lends itself to a facilitated discussion or interactive exercise at your staff meetings:

1. Empowerment

This refers to the fact that each employee needs to understand that they are empowered - and expected - to help customers or others in the organization in any way they can. They need to "own" problems or requests that are presented to them until they are resolved. The best examples of this are hotels like The Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons. At these hotels, if you ask any member of the staff for anything, they stick with you until you get what you want, whether that means directions to the restroom or fixing a minor repair in your room.

At your training meeting, have your team brainstorm about how they can implement this concept. Also, discuss how the company will not impose negative consequences when someone steps outside their normal role to help a customer.

2. Communication

Being able to listen well and speak clearly are two important foundations of customer service. Your staff should spend some meeting time establishing communication standards and working through communication challenges on the job (e.g., too much email and not enough face-to-face interactions).

3. "Can-do" attitude

A "can-do" attitude is related to both communication and empowerment, described above. But if your staff is to adopt this attitude, they need to be rewarded and incentivized to do so. Use a staff meeting to discuss what the staff feels would be meaningful motivators, such as rewards or recognition. A lot of successful customer service organizations also use staff meeting time to recognize team members who went above and beyond. You can also institute a contest in which people are encouraged and rewarded for submitting customer service improvement ideas.

4. Perspective taking

This may be one of the most important components of delivering exceptional customer service. Your staff must be able to take the point of view of the people they are serving, so they can accurately diagnose the customer service need in any situation. At a staff meeting, there are a number of exercises you can conduct to reinforce perspective taking. For example, there are many commonly used pictures that look like one thing when viewed one way and something entirely different when viewed with a different perspective - one of the more famous of these pictures looks like an old hag or a young woman, depending on your perspective. Showing a series of these pictures, which are readily available on the Internet, is a fun way to demonstrate perspective taking.

5. Cross training

Cross training is also known as collaboration. This means that each person needs to understand that they are not acting alone. Your entire company should work together to deliver exceptional customer service. Discussing ways that staff people can support others in their job duties will make for a lively and useful staff meeting.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. The key is to understand what issues or factors affect customer service in your organization and then develop exercises to teach these important skills. For instance, perhaps your company does a lot of its business by telephone. In that case, a program focused on telephone skills would be useful. Just remember that this is a topic that needs to be addressed often to keep consciousness high and to keep your staff representing your company in a way that makes you proud.