Importance of training and development in customer service

Training and development is an essential cornerstone in promoting a customer service philosophy. Everyone throughout the organisation should be involve and include in training and development to enhance knowledge, skills and attitude towards customer service. There are different approaches to training and development that can be adopted, start with listening to customers.

Best practice organisations use the information which customers provide to draw up training an development objectives for their organisations and to ensure they keep a clear focus on the business. Customer service is all what the customer says it is. Only by asking customers their opinion can a business gain a true perspective on what matters to customers and how well it is performing, and thereby identify areas for improvement. This type of gap analysis will then identify areas where it could proactively improve its service and add value to the customer.

Customer focus groups and interviews are other methods that organisation use to get more 'subjective' feel for customer expectation. Quantitative surveys are also now common place in most organisations, sometimes backed up by mystery shoppers to check that service delivery is consistent.

Listening to customers, therefore, helps prioritise the areas most in need of development. Key success criteria can then be agreed.

In setting training and development objectives and deciding on the methods to be adopted, it must be remembered that training and development will be more accepted when trainee is motivated to learn and in addition, when management wants the learning to take place. Therefore, it is important to create the right environment for learning to take place- training should be enjoyable and not seen as a chore.

The objectives of the training and development must be clearly explained and agreed by both the trainer/manager and the trainee. A clear set of objectives will allow the training and development to be validated after it has taken place and performance to be reviewed systematically as part of an overall programme of customer satisfaction.