I am working as a project director in a important delivery company in Chile. My job concerns changing the customer service culture in a company which has very low profile people without an educational background. The goal of this project is to set up behavioural standards in how these contact people deliver goods to door to door. I want to improve the attitudes involved in this service. The problem that I have now is that nobody understands even what a good service means and they don´t believe that the service is part of their responsibility and competence.
The last matter that I have is how I can contain the social clashes that emerge during my training sessions?
Camilo Mendoza.
Chile.
Camilo Mendoza
5 Responses
Try a Champion Team
Camilo
It seems you have some deep-rooted problems and I doubt you will be able to change the culture very quickly if you use a broad approach. My own recommendation is that you work with a very small team (a champion team) at first to show just what can be achieved with excellent customer service. The evidence of achievement will need to be easy for others to recognise (as empirical as possible) so that your wider audience will be able to understand the benefits of excellent customer service.
On the question of social clashes, do you mean between your trainees or between trainer and trainees?
Happy to follow up by e-mail if you wish.
Chris Cordery
Customer Service Culture
Under some circumstances a champion team may lead others to believe that since they have not been chosen to be part of the team they are of lower importance and this can have a negative effect.
Getting as many people involved from the start might be useful – for example, encourage team members to develop a mission statement for their team’s role and then show them how the mission statement can be proved by implementing measurable quality standards based on the mission statement.
Give the team examples of how other delivery services are aiming to be the best (study their adverts and company literature and ask the staff what they know or have heard about the companies) and encourage your staff to do better – get them to think of ways how this can be done.
Role playing may be useful as it will help the contact people understand how they would wish a delivery person to behave towards them but if there are wide cultural differences then such role playing needs to be carefully controlled to ensure it does not get out of hand.
Develop an in-house training programme that has a sequence of targets to be met with the reward of an in-house certificate. Make the initial goals fairly straightforward so that most people will pass without too much trouble. Have a clear progression based upon this ’employee training programme’ to show how your company has a planned strategy for its staff and is this making an investment in their development.
As Chris pointed out, it would help to know more about the nature of the cultural differences.
Hope this helps.
Customer service survey – perceptions & expectations
It may help to carry out a customer satisfaction survey to unearth the perceptions and expectations of customers AND staff, to see if there are any major gaps (or successes) and focus on these in training etc. Customers could be asked to name companies in your sector that give good service and examples of that, rate companies in terms of performance in 5 key areas: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, empathy and assurance (set questions for each of these areas, e.g ‘are deliveries made to schedule?’ etc. By asking customers you get a feeling from where you are perceived to be in the market place; by asking staff, this will focus on areas of demotivation or lack of awareness. A combination of both internal and external surveys should give you a starting point for training and home in on where you need to put in effort to change the culture. Good luck.
How are you currently measuring their performance?
You may need to look at how you currently reward your employees. If they are focused on the number of deliveries they make, then they probably don’t pay much attention to how they deal with the customer.
Can you build into their performance expectations some quality measures? In doing this you would persuade (force?) them to focus on more than just quantity.
Cambio de cultura
Lo que tu necessites es una cambio de cultura.
Los latinos son muy bien a tratar con clientes muy conocidos, pero si el cliente no es muy conocido es muy facil de hacer una forma de servicio muy bureaucratico.
Yo entiendo muy bien este situo, ha trabajada con clientes como BBVA, Ford y Iberdrola, en Espana, para hacer cambios en la cultura de la empressa.
Primeramente, en me experiencia, es un cambio en el importancia de los clientes.
‘El cliente es el Rey’ el concepto de Tom Peters es un concepto muy importante y tambien muy facil de entender para todo la gente. El cliente tene el dinero, i es su elecion en qual que lugar el quiero utilise este dinero. Si tu no tratas con el cliente en una alta mannera, hay autros que sabe muy bien la forma mejor de tratar con los clientes.
Menos mal que los libros de Tom Peters son muy facil para comprar en ediciones espanoles, pero hay muchos autros muy importantes y tambien muy relevantes para ti que no tene ediciones espanoles. Si tu quieres algun ayudar con estos por favor llama me: me numero del officina es (44) 1843 584264 o utilise me direcion electronica.
Buena suerte,
Megan