One of my favourite comedy series is the original UK version of The Office. Following the antics of a feckless group of late thirty-something managers and employees. They worked for a fictitious paper supply company in Slough, a non-descript English town. It was produced in a mockumentary style and was immensely popular in the early 2000s.
For me, as a professional manager at the time, the funniest episode was the customer care training day. The employees and ignorant bombastic manager tormented the external trainer, who had the unenviable task of simple customer care training.
The fact they had an episode dedicated to this, highlights the shared experience of customer care training for the viewers. That in turn highlights the importance of customer care to any business.
Fertility clinics are customer-facing businesses and the generic principles of customer care apply.
Why does customer care sometimes fall by the wayside?
As a manager I noticed that businesses, from large to small, often get the main principles of customer care right at a senior level. However, problems seem to arise for two reasons:
- Management initiatives on customer care fizzle out after an initial burst of enthusiasm
- Ongoing, or repeated, training for customer care is often neglected.
This second issue is very important. The reason is quite simply time. As employees change, the priorities of the business change, and challenges of the moment dominate the day-to-day arena of business. And those challenges often have nothing to do with customer care.
Let me illustrate this with an example.
A previous employer of mine once employed a lady called Catherine. Catherine was intelligent, hard-working and dedicated to excellence in project delivery. Catherine soon rose through the ranks to head up her own department. The department did well, projects were delivered to perfection and many long-term clients were retained. But there was a problem. New accounts introduced to the department often withered, and there were complaints about attitude from these, often new customers. Staff turnover in the department was also high. This meant too much management time was spent either mollifying staff or recruiting new people!
What was the problem?
Here are a few things various people said about Catherine:
“She’s brilliant. The best project manager I have ever encountered”
Senior Client
“She doesn’t suffer fools gladly”
Senior Manager
“I don’t like the tone of her emails”
A junior executive client
“Gets the job done, and that’s the main thing.”
“You just have to take it and get on with it”
A member of her team who felt unjustly criticised
“I insist on having Catherine’s team’
A long-term client
“Please transfer our account to another team”
A new client
So, what was going on here?
The problem was that some of the principles of customer service had fallen by the wayside over time.
For some people, like Catherine, aspects of emotional intelligence are not as developed as some of their other brilliant faculties. In fact, because of their excellent qualities in project management and problem solving, it’s just assumed they’ll maintain the simple stuff like excellence in customer service.
The five principles of customer care
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Customers/clients perceive your organisation via their experience with customer touch points.
Customers don’t know what goes on behind the scenes to produce and deliver the service or products they have ordered. Instead they build their impressions from customer touch points, the interaction that occurs whenever they deal with someone from your organisation.
Any employee that has customer contact is a source of these touch points. Whether they are communicating face-to-face, by telephone, mail, email or any of the means afforded now in the modern world.
With that in mind it is worth investing in training these staff to make the most of their communication with customers. For instance, customer service should start with the first call usually via telephone to the organisation.
A receptionist who is adept at customer service will have skills be trained, in the following three areas:
- Communication skills: excellent verbal communication skills combined with active listening skills. As well as connecting callers with the right employees, a good receptionist will triage calls without causing any offence. They will also handle basic customer service queries adeptly
- Professional appearance and attitude: polish and poise are very much part of the customer experience. This builds an immediate impression in the mind of the customer
- Interpersonal aplomb: these are the soft skills, which come naturally for some. For others they have to be actively engaged. They include things like friendliness, patience, collaborative approach, and a calm non-aggressive approach to confrontation and/or criticism. And if these skills are not inherent, they can often be successfully acted out!
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Employee satisfaction is a cornerstone of customer care
Studies show a strong link between employee job satisfaction and quality of customer service provided by those employees.
Generally, humans feel good to be of service to someone. This is what motivates employees with management to create and maintain a strong culture of customer care. But, for this to happen, the employees themselves must feel valued and be satisfied with their jobs.
If employees are not satisfied, they’ll do the minimum to get by including not paying enough attention to customers. To them the job, and the customer care that goes with it, is just a chore.
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Always show customers they are valued. Don’t assume they intrinsically know it!
It’s easy to make the mistake of assuming that customers know they are valued and don’t need to be validated in this knowledge. It IS a mistake because no one likes to be taken for granted.
It goes without saying that the most important aspect of showing customers that they are valued is to take care of their service needs in a high-quality manner. However, customers have needs that go beyond the transaction. They want to be appreciated, respected and cared for.
It is therefore important to actively assure them of this care. Therefore, before ending a call, a face-to-face visit or any kind of transaction with a customer, employees should take a moment to tell the customer that their business is appreciated. However, it is important to avoid cliched and scripted expressions of appreciation. It is much better to formulate one’s own natural responses tailored to the client and the situation.
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Internal customer care is as important as external customer care
As an employee, you have to care about the service you give in order to give excellent customer service. The same can be said of the respect with which you treat your colleagues as these are your internal customers.
An internal customer is a colleague who depends on the timing and quality of your work in order to succeed. If the internal delivery of a project goes wrong, then so will the external delivery.
The best watchwords here are probably mutual respect. One way of expressing this is the zero-criticism rule utilised by PR and advertising agencies. They utilise this as they are at the frontline of customer communication.
The zero-criticism rule means that there is no public informal criticism of either customers or colleagues permitted. It’s as simple as that! This does not banish criticism, which is an important and necessary aspect of organisational life. But criticism should be constructive and channelled through management processes, rather than allowed to fester everywhere like a fungus.
Of course, it’s not possible to ban water-cooler grumpiness, but it’s surprising how much positive impact a simple rule like this can make.
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Trained staff deliver great service and great customer care
It should never be taken for granted that employees know what goes into great internal and external customer service. So, training in customer care is a prerequisite for good performance.
Training should not be seen as a one-off item. And nor should it be a rubber-stamp, once-in-a-blue moon activity, as per the enjoyable, for the wrong reasons The Office episode! This means strong and consistent coaching on an ongoing basis.
As such, it needs to be included in training programmes for employees and assessed as part of their annual appraisals. Employees often enjoy scoring highly in this area as they feel it is a measure not only of their value to the company, but of their sociability.
A fertility clinic is a customer-facing organisation like any other, and new business from patients is the life-blood.
Repeat business from retained patients may not be quite so important as in other areas, but customer promotion in terms of word-of-mouth is extremely important. Good customer care ensures that clinics get the most from their customers in terms of attracting new customers.
So, did we put the aforementioned Catherine on a high-powered re-education course in customer services?
Well, no. She was a little too senior for that, and she’d been on them before and obviously taken them lightly!
But we DID put her team on customer service training courses, and made them accountable for their own customer service performance. And then, of course Catherine’s natural competitiveness took over! She ensured that her own team was the best at customer service as well as all the other parameters on which the teams were judged!
Neil Madden, Editor
The Fertility Hub
