Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

In the continuing challenge of customer service management, two things always service that are necessary to be successful: training and rate of business growth.

The most overlooked of the two is the rate of business growth. If you don't manage growth, training becomes irrelevant as people are thrust into positions and situations where a minimum amount of training is done so that a body can simply be put into place. This is a huge mistake. What's the sense of growing beyond what you can service? It doesn't make any sense. Yet company after company make this same mistake. We must learn to manage growth at a rate where we can train our employees to offer excellent service to the customer.

Concerning training, the biggest mistake there is that a lot of training is related to the wrong skills. Scott Broetzmann, president and CEO of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting says that training usually covers three issues (in call centers): "The history of the company, the system and what employees can or cannot do over the phone. Those things have very little to do with whether you can provide good customer service or not, knowing how to apologize, or provide a good explanation, or be responsive to a myriad of issues that somebody calls about are skills that many training programs are sorely lacking.”

The best example of this recently is the Dell (DELL) customer service fiasco.

To me the best way to deal with this again goes back to who you hire in the first place. Someone who will be doing a lot of interacting with customers must have a great attitude to begin with. They must be a people person who can grasp the majority of the problems that customers will call or ask about concerning the products and services the company offers.

Make sure that training involved people skills as much as ability to answer the majority of customer questions and you will perform far beyond most of your competitors.