by Ben Aidoo

Created on: May 05, 2010

Training your staff to answer the telephone on the third ring with a cheerful voice, being helpful to customers, treating customers respectfully and courteously, greeting customers by name, if known, and being informed about the features and benefits of your product, are important customer service policies. 

But where the rubber meets the road is how you handle customer complaints. These may not be pleasant, but customer complaints are a form of feedback that offer you the opportunity to evaluate your policies, practices and procedures, and where needed for corrective action to be taken to improve customer service.

Prompt and effective response to customer complaints is where training, promotion of personal growth and incentives are critical in preparing your staff to perform at their highest levels.

Your staff preparedness should aim at giving them the tools to effectively resolve customer complaints during the first contact. This will increase customer satisfaction, product loyalty and the likelihood that satisfied customers will buy other products from you, and tell their family and friends about your products and great customer service.

While company policies and procedures are necessary to maintain quality standard, they should be flexible to allow your staff to improvise in situations where customer service guidelines offer no help. How effective this is done depends on the quality of training given to staff, their experience and the available tools and leeway to make such improvisation.

When a staff member is recognized for a job well done, it boost his or her confidence to do better going forward. Better still, when top management respond by giving that employee more responsibilities and puts him or her on a glide path upward, it serves as a career template for other staff members to emulate, thus greatly improving the overall quality of customer service.

Empowering your staff through training and personal growth comes with some risk. Mistakes will be made: in some cases by over-exuberance and in other by unavoidable circumstances. How you handle these mistakes, either as reasons to reprimand your staff, or as feedback on your policies, practices and procedures will determine how long your staff remained empowered to do their jobs.

Let's face it, monetary incentives are effective in empowering sales staff to perform at their best. For one thing, monetary incentives give them the power to acquire material things they would otherwise not have. And each day at work they are reminded that to maintain their quality of life they must perform at their best.

For another, with the job market as tough as it is, there might not be another job readily available to provide them with that level of income, which is more than enough reason that monetary incentives will encourage your staff to hold onto their job.

What this boils down to is that sales staff who are empowered by training to do their job with confidence, put on an upward glide path in their career, given monetary incentives to perform at their best, will do everything in their power to seek cutting edge information on how to effectively perform their job, and that means providing great customer service.

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