Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
Education and Training: do they Deliver Satisfied Customers?
Speak to a customer and suggest they need education or training, and their reaction may be that you were being condescending. However, if you spoke to them about developing their understanding or informing them of your offering, they may view this positively, as a clear sign of your wish to assist. Ultimately, you should be more interested in gaining a better understanding from the customer about their needs and have them inform you of their thoughts, thereby helping you to develop your product to suit their needs more effectively.
Are the words education and training then, misunderstood, and too often misrepresented by businesses? Is this why they are so often devalued or not taken seriously by either the recipient or the provider? Quite often the result is that the wrong people are trained and those who really need the training avoid learning the message. Do you want to tell the MD he needs education and/or training in anything? A much better approach would be to spend time informing and developing the MD’s understanding of the aspect in question.
Personnel across the business will receive customer calls, through one means or another, and must be trained to be responsible for customer service; this is normally termed “empowerment” of the staff. However empowerment without training is akin to a ten year old driving a Porsche. Therefore it is vital to educate and train to provide good customer service levels and customer satisfaction. One interesting perspective given by a senior manager recently is that many companies worry about the cost of training staff who subsequently leave; he is more concerned about the staff that stay, but are not trained adequately.
Many companies have begun to recognize the importance of high calibre staff as a component in delivering high quality service.
This article is accessible for registered visitors only.
You can register here
Registered users can tell Noventum about which subjects they would like to receive email.
Without previous permission data will not be used by others.
