5 Responses

1. Behaviour exercise

    

   My favourite exercise is a fairly simple one.  Split the group into smaller teams.  Tell them they’re travel agents in a small ‘local’ branch of a national company and they’ve won a fantastic around the world trip.  All expenses paid, first class all the way and £10k spending money!  Just one problem – they can’t go as there’s no-one to cover their role. So, they have to advertise for a temp. Explain that this person will effectively be keeping their seat warm and MUST offer the same award winning service to their customers as they would.

    

   Hand out Post-It notes and ask them to write as many adjectives as they can think of for the advert. You’ll get the usual: good time keeping, honest, friendly and so on.

    

   Then, when they’re done, get them to stick the Post-Its onto a wall or board split into Skill / Knowledge / Attitude.  Get them to decide which category an adjective fits into – don’t steer them, let them decide independently.

    

   When the groups are done you’ll find most of the adjectives fall under Attitude – and this is the key message; customer service is all about attitude.  The strength of this exercise is that the groups came up with the adjectives and they told you that these were attitude based.  So it’s tapping into what they feel about customer service – you didn’t tell them to think this, they came up with it organically, which makes for a very powerful “penny dropping” moment.

    

   It takes about 30 minutes to do and is really easy to set up.

2. Jane, I LOVE it

   Hi Jane

   What a super exercise – I absolutely love it. I assume as you’ve posted it on the forum you are happy for others to use it?

   Thanks for sharing it.

   Jenny

3. Feel free

   Please feel free to use this exercise.  I think I ‘borrowed’ it from a collegue originally anyway.  Hey, that’s what we trainers do isn’t it?

4. Customer Care idea

   Great idea! I’m going to use it as an activity in our Customer Service training – thank you!

5. Identifying Ideal Behaviours

   A couple of years ago I sat down with the Customer Service Managers as at that time as there was considerable unrest in the team and I realised the Manager’s did not know what behaviours they wished their team to exhibit.

   I told them that it was necessary to make some redundancies within the company (purely an imaginary situation – but they did not know that) and I wanted a name from them of who they could afford to lose and who they would insist on keeping.  I told them to write the names down independently and once I had their names I asked them to collaborate as to why they had selected that particular person to go or stay; I then went on to say that I needed names for number 2 to go and number 2 to stay, again asked for reasons, then number 3 for both; again with reasons.

   I was then able to reassure them that there were no redudancy plans (I know that if there had been I would have needed a "pool" of people and would have needed to have considered "consultation" – this was purely a hypothetical exercise) but then asked them to revisit their list of reasons for those to stay and those that they would have released.

   This exercise enabled the managers to idenfify the behaviours that each customer service team member needed to have to be an effective team member; helping drawing up job descriptions, job adverts and identifying training needs for those members that could have (theoretically) been ‘lost’ from the team.

   Hazel.