I was recently delivering some training, as an external consultant, to a team of customer service staff. The session began by looking at Listening Skills and, to frame the exercises, I introduced the excellent Robert Bolton’s Listening Clusters, found in his book People Skills. One skill he names as “Door Openers” – which are, essentially, the prompts people can give to initiate conversation, to give others the confidence and opportunity to begin conversation. I am a little obsessed with these clusters and Door Openers in particular – and we’ll be looking at them in more detail in later submissions. For this section, I am more interested in what one of the delegates said to me about using these skills: “An organisation can’t just train its staff to do this, we have to want to so we do it naturally and honestly”.

I think this is a very honest perspective and one that, in the whole, I agree with. In fact, I would say that my career focus has been on working to build customer service teams who instinctively deliver high performance due to how the organisations, culturally and structurally, has been designed to support, encourage and performance manage. At the heart of this is a Treat our Staff the way we want them to treat our customers philosophy. Here, training can only be delivering a promise that the rest of the worker experience has to deliver. We want to confidently say what we believe in, and what role we need customer services play in that belief, but we need to carefully, and consciously, design policies, procedures and working practices which demonstrate that belief. Anything else, and training will just be paying lip service and will be a root cause of discontent.

But first, we have to know, consistently, how to say what we believe. Defining what constitutes effective customer service is relatively easy. Ensuring that our workers deliver it consistently, intuitively and, therefore, in a manner that our visitors feel is genuine is the challenge. To build an instinct to always deliver on, and beyond, expectations it is vital that our teams can visualise the through-line between how we need them to perform, from the simplest of service skills (such as a warm greeting and eye contact) to the more advanced rapport building, and our business success.

Let’s take as our starting point my own simple definition of Audience Experience: The combination of the audience reactions to the products on offer and their emotional responses to how the organisation provides them. Focusing on how the organisation has made a customer feel during and after an interaction is key in measuring if we have had the correct impact. If we are to successfully engage our team with the notion of success stemming from not just what they do but the feelings they create when they do it, it is very important that we can clearly define the feelings we want to create and, therefore, those we must avoid.

Below is an example of a Mission Statement I devised with various customer service teams from a large Arts Venue. In the workshop, I asked three simple questions: “What emotions do you want to create in your customers?”, “What do you, as Customer Service Team members, need to demonstrate in order to create these emotions?” and “What does successfully creating the emotions allow you to deliver?”. We grouped all the possible answers, using post-it notes and a large wall, and together, agreed a summary.

For the first question, “what emotions do we want to create”, we agreed they wanted their customer to feel:

INSPIRED…not disappointed.

CURIOUS… not indifferent.

VALUED… not ignored

TRUSTING… not different.

The above were specific to the Arts organisation and, eventually, formed part of what became known as the Customer Service One Team Mission Statement. “One Team” because they had various customer service teams but wanted to create consistency of experiences offered to their customers. The statement begins by defining the emotions that, combined,  the teams are responsible for. These include both those that relate to the transactional nature of their operations (Valued/Trusting) and the more “experience-based” (Inspired/Curious), underlining our role in delivering how we want our visitors to feel about the organisation as a whole. I also feel it is important to define the opposite, negative emotions to help us have the conversations when guidelines are not followed.

When talking about customer emotions, it is good to regularly stress two key points:

 - Emotional reactions are complicated – customers therefore are looking for clues, or mental shortcuts, to help make decisions or simplify what/how they feel about an organisation.

- These “clues” can be found anywhere and the emotions/feelings they trigger can spread and often be misattributed. How a single point of contact makes a visitor feel can, for example, have an impact on how they go on to experience an event or production. This is known as The Halo Effect

From here, we can see that, through our interactions with each customer, we carry clues to help them understand, trust and be passionate about who we are and what we offer.

After this clear starting point, in the workshop, we turned the next two question to explore with more clarity what the teams would need to demonstrate and, crucial for worker motivation, what they are able to contribute to with success. The remainder of the Mission Statement could then be agreed. Here it is in its entirety:

We work together to deliver experiences at every opportunity that make our visitors feel:

INSPIRED…not disappointed.

CURIOUS… not indifferent.

VALUED… not ignored

TRUSTING… not different.

We do this by always demonstrating, through our language, attitude and actions:

POSITIVITY… As enthusiastic about who we are as we want our visitors to be.

KNOWLEDGE… Informed of and engaged with all that we have to offer.

EMPATHY… Understanding of and open to every visitor’s perspective and needs.

CARE… Showing our commitment through attention to detail and accuracy of communication.

This allows us to offer:

Meaningful and memorable relationships with every visitor.

Encouragement to understand, discover and explore all that we offer.

Opportunities to participate in, support and contribute to a community that visitors feel a sense of belonging to.

 

This, clearly, is not an “off the shelf”, “one size fits all”, statement of customer service intent, but one that is carefully designed around a particular organisation and their particular employee’s perspectives and experiences. Having defined these specific team aims, or the “What, how and why”, we’ve established the promise of what we believe in. Next steps on the delivery of that promise, to both the staff and their customers, is to clearly set the customer service performance skills needed by all.