Creating a Culture of Excellent Customer Service

I recently facilitated a workshop in an organization for a group of managers and their staff on "Creating a Culture of Customer Service." I met with the managers first to get to know them and find out how they managed people, how they communicated with their staff, what their style of leadership was (collaborative or command and control), what their challenges were, etc. They were going to be in the workshop and it was important to understand who they were and what was going on with them before I met with the larger group.
For an ice breaker, I had everyone introduce themselves and share one word describing customer service.  The organization's values showed up again and again. I asked if these values were displayed on the walls anywhere in the office? They weren't but the leader and managers said it was important that they be added and they were going to do that. There was a long list of fabulous one word descriptions and a few words describing what was going on now that they could work on to improve the cultural environment.

When focusing on customer service, a company has to understand the importance of internal customer service first before they can offer excellent customer service to the people they serve. Values are an important part of a company culture in how people are treated, communicated with, and valued. If a company understands this, customer service outward focused will become second nature to a company - they simply live it everyday. A good example of who exemplfies excellent customer service is Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Zappos - with their staff and with their customers.

An exercise to use with staff is to allow people to get to know each other on a personal level. I ask questions about who they are, what they like about working where they work, what they like about the people they work with, what could change, etc. It's also very important to talk about the various styles of communicating: generational differences, men vs. women, diversity of cultures, introverts and extroverts, personality differences.  It all matters and is important to be aware of all of these dynamics as is messages and intentions.

At the end of the session, people really enjoyed the experience. They got to know their fellow employees a bit better, even learned something new about others and themselves.  To reinforce the learning, management committted to getting together and continuing the focus to keep the momentum going, including creating a fun Friday where they posted pictures, shared stories and celebrated each other. Our work will continue so customer service is just embedded in the culture and people know when they come to this organization, the staff care and they feeled served. It take effort, dedication and commitment to work on this. It's great working with an organization that cares about the people they serve and each other.