Training
City of Philadelphia Celebrates Customer Service Week in a Big Way
Customer Service Week was a tremendous success! The conversations that took place during these trainings were meaningful and lead to very important questions and reframing of our customer service mentality.
During our first session, City employees and I deconstructed the role of customer service in creating a welcoming, responsive, connected city. We discussed this topic in great detail. What makes a welcoming city? Who is our customer and why are they customers, why not citizens? We talked about how to treat customers like you value their investment in our communities, workforce, and local economy. Our customers are what drives our city and we want to show them we appreciate them.
Public service means committing to and working for the people. Because of the nature of public service, an immense customer base and often limited resources can lead to disgruntled customers and equally frustrated city workers. That is why these workshops were geared towards training and development of the every day heroes who work directly with customers on a daily basis. These City employees came out to discuss the importance of quality customer service because they believe in their calling.
You may have seen my recent post on our second session. To recap, Darryll Adams, General Manager of the Ritz-Carlton, Philadelphia spoke to City employees about what it means to provide outstanding service. He talked about your attitude, appearance, and presentation all being a factor. He talked about choosing the right employees, with a customer-oriented mindset both on and off the job, and getting employees invested in the mission. Customer Service is directly connected to efficiency. In a cyclical way, when your employees are invested and believe in what they are doing they provide better services and the customer satisfaction rate increases dramatically.
Our thirds session, with Stacey Mosley of the Office of Innovation and Technology, covered open data. We went through what open data is, how we obtain and share it, and what practical uses it has in your department, particularly as it relates to customer service. Open data increases transparency. When residents, businesses, and visitors have more data, they are equipped to make better decisions. Open data can also reduce the amount of calls from customers looking for information that is public through open data and media can access information without a right to know request. All of these aspects of open data help make Philadelphia, more efficient and responsive to the needs of our customers.
In our final session, we talked about putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. We went through the process of defining your desired customer experience and did some brainstorming on what the customer experience model could be for the departments present at this session. Reading Terminal Market presented about their customer service model and how they developed it, and how it has helped them in creating a cohesive experience for all of their customers and vendors too. We closed by talking about what role social media can play in defining and enhancing the customer experience.
All of the Customer Service Week sessions were about training, brainstorming, and working together to provide the best interaction possible when customers work with their local government in Philadelphia. But this week was also about recognizing the great work of our very own every day heroes in Philadelphia. The customer service representatives on the front lines, helping people understand and navigate city government; these are the every day heroes. The City of Philadelphia celebrates all of the employees who directly impact the experience customers have with city government, these representatives are the first impression customers have of the City.
City services are directly related to quality of life concerns. Citizens and government need to work together to keep making this city cleaner, greener, and safer. That is what we are here to do, and we want to acknowledge and celebrate
the success we have had so far, as we continue to improve our service standards.
Thank you to everyone who participated in Customer Service Week! We are looking forward to doing it again next year!
How Are You Developing Your Talent?
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Above is the sneak peek for the The Philly311 Show’s latest episode with guest Jackie Linton, Director of the Center of Excellence. I really enjoyed sitting down with Jackie and discussing the Center of Excellence’s three core functions: Project Management, building project management capabilities; Organizational Development, developing talent for the future; and Performance Management, supporting departments in managing their performance metrics and facilitating external transparency. While all of these functions have a direct tie to customer service excellence, I would like to focus on organizational development (specifically talent development) for this week’s customer service tip.
Developing talent within your organization is crucial to your customer service operations for two important reasons: the first is that many of the employees who are on the receiving end of development programs are ones closest to your customers. Customer service representatives, supervisors, or even call center managers have direct contact with your customers every day, with the ability to make or break your customers’ overall experience. With such constant high stake interactions, these are the employees whom you should be developing the most. While most organizations carefully plan and implement training programs, development programs are just as important as they help to build the skills, knowledge, and confidence of your employees on and supporting the front line.
The second reason that talent development is so important in customer service is that a good development program helps to build employee engagement. While most organizations agree that higher employee engagement leads to better customer service, most organizations do not agree on the best ways to engagement their employees. Why not engage your employees by taking a proactive interest in their future? This will not only help your employees to feel valued but it will also help them take a vested interest in the organization’s success. (Forbes has a great blog post about why employee development is so important.)
As customer service professionals, what do you think are the best ways to develop your talent?
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue or visit her blog at www.rosettacarringtonlue.com
The Philly311 Show Sneak Peek: Immigrant and Multicultural Affairs in Customer Service
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Above is a sneak peek from the newest episode of The Philly311 Show, airing tomorrow. In this episode, I sit down with Jennifer Rodriquez, the Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant and Multicultural Affairs. Jennifer speaks about the services her offices provides to Philadelphia’s non-English speaking community including in-person translation, document translation, and the training of City employees to better meet the needs of a multicultural customer base.
Diversity is an important topic for customer service executives. How can you provide excellent customer service to a diverse customer base speaking a wide-range of languages? The answer is more complex than simply outsourcing a translation service.
When planning to provide customer service across cultures it’s important to not to treat every customer in the “same” way but to treat every customer in an “equal” way. This means that Non-English customers (or culturally diverse customers) should not feel inconvenienced when engaging with your organization; they also should not feel as if your organization is being inconvenienced by serving them.
While there are many outstanding technical solutions to serve a multicultural customer base, treating every customer equally also hinges on internal training. Are you training your employees on the nuisances of multicultural communication or are you training to simply transfer to a translation service? Language aside, different cultures communicate in different ways (i.e. tone of voice; volume; etc.) If your employees are trained on multicultural communication, they might not become multicultural experts but they will at least be cognisant of the endless differences that exist. With this knowledge, your employees can be more sympathetic, patient, and prepared when dealing with customers of a different cultures.
The Philly311 Show airs on Philadelphia’s Channel 64 at 7:00pm on Monday/Wednesday/Sunday and 7:00am on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. The episodes can also be found on the Philly311 YouTube channel.
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue or visit her blog at www.rosettacarringtonlue.com
Public Sector Customer Service: Philly 311 – Triumphing to Transform Local Government Service Delivery
Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal is the first online publication to bring a public focus to social innovators and their nonprofit organizations, foundations and social sector businesses in the Greater Philadelphia area, to recognize their…
Should Your Organization Have a Customer Service Plan? Part One
Should your organization have a customer service plan? The simple answer is yes!
Developing a Customer Service Plan
While implementing specific customer service initiatives and programs is essential to creating a positive customer experience within an organization, these efforts need to be developed together as part of a customer service plan to increase their effectiveness and make sure that they are strategically aligned. Taking the time to develop a comprehensive customer service plan can help to ensure that your efforts are customer-centric, sustainable and consistent with each other.
Over the years, I have developed customer service plans of all shapes and sizes, ranging from tiny, digestible plans for single departments to the massive, voluminous plans needed to serve large companies or city governments. As part of my Customer Service Officers Program within the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director’s Office, I walk designated customer service officers through the process of creating a customer service plan for their individual departments. Let’s walk through the steps in how to create a customer service plan:
Get Buy-In
As it is first, getting “Buy-In” is probably the most important step to creating and implementing a customer service plan within your department or organization. As a customer service leader, you need to communicate both the importance and urgency of a strong customer service plan to the people who have the power to make changes. Buy-in ensures that your efforts will have enough resources to get off the ground. It also ensures that your organization’s leaders will make these efforts a priority in their implementation phase and will not ignore them once real changes are made.
Understand your Customers
Understanding your customers is a vital step in creating a customer service plan and ought to take up most of your time prior to actually writing the plan. Getting to know your customers means mapping out who your customers actually are (every internal and external customer you might have) and getting real feedback from them on their wants and needs.
Far too often leaders within an organization say something to the effect of “Well I know what the customers want.” Developing an effective customer service plan, however, means actually hearing and understanding what the customers want and catering to their real, not perceived, needs.
In the Customer Service Officers Program, officers conduct at least 5 focus groups of both internal and external customers to better understand their department’s current service and customers’ expectations. As part of the requirement, all of the focus groups need to be conducted prior to creating the actual plan, allowing the feedback to be the driving force behind its development.
(Sometimes, real customer feedback can help to get buy-in from your organization’s leaders)
Want to know more about how and why your organization should have a customer service plan? Stay tuned for “Should Your Organization Have a Customer Service Plan? Part Two” !
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue
How to Create a Stellar Customer Service Training Program
You cannot expect to create a culture of excellent customer service without a training program. Employees need to be given the education and tools to adopt your organizations’ customer service values. Through my years in the private and public sectors, I have seen customer service training programs ranging from lecture-based to hands-on exercises to pamphlets to everything in-between. One of my most recent experiences with customer service training program was the “Customer Service Leadership Academy” I launched in 2009 for the City of Philadelphia. Although this class was originally developed for a small group of employees, it expanded within the next year to train over 24,000 employees. Across mediums and sizes, however, the success of these programs (getting employees to “buy-in” to customer service values and techniques) relies on two things: structure and engagement. We can tackle structure first.
In creating a customer service training program, you need to make sure it has real structure. By this I mean that the program has substance—the program needs to have been built on concrete values with the buy-in from an organization’s leadership. This will provide the training program with the resources it needs to be sustained. Structure and substance also deals with the actual make-up of the program. Is this program only a few PowerPoint slides? Have you as the facilitator done outside research? Do you have committed instructors? Put yourself in the shoes of the attending employees: does this program have enough structure to be meaningful for you?
Here is a “To-Do” List to ensure your customer service training program has structure:
- Establish your organization’s customer service values and what you hope the training program will accomplish.
- Get buy-in from organizations leaders; make sure the leaders can deliver the resources you need.
- Review supplementary materials from outside sources.
- Craft a course curriculum keeping in mind both the goals of the program and the employees’ point of view.
- Incorporate other mediums of education and learning (i.e. videos; hands-on exercises) to provide a textured learning experience.
- Launch the program, being careful to take feedback from employees along the way.
- Evaluate the program and its results before offering another session.
One of the ways we were able to add to the Customer Service Leadership Academy’s structure was to gather immediate feedback after each session. This was accomplished by simply asking participating employees to fill-out a survey as each session finished, creating an instantaneous bench-marking system for the program and its instructors.
The next key to your customer service training program being a success is engagement. While engagement can mean discussion and entertainment (you don’t want to bore your employees to death) it should also expand on what is traditionally taught. In creating an engaging customer service training program, are you giving employees a chance to look at V.O.C. metrics? Are there case studies to show examples of best practices? Have you properly explained customer service vs. customer experience? To create an engaging training program, you need to provide both interesting and challenging examples to get employees thinking about customer service practices past what they have typically been taught—it’s the best way to get their buy-in.
A way we tried to create a high level of engagement in the Customer Service Leadership Academy was through inviting instructors from the private sectors to share their stories and best practices. This gave employees another lens to which to look at customer service practices. It provided entertainment while adding a new dimension to the learning experience.
Do you agree with structure and engagement being critical in a customer service training program’s success? Help me out by leaving your suggestions in the comments below and the best answer (determined by me) will be rewarded with a $5 Starbucks gift card.
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue.
Deliver a World-Class Customer Experience | TIME.com
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Take a page out of Disney’s employee training playbook to see how creative management can lead to fully engaged employees dedicated to pleasing customers.
Enjoyed reading this article and the author summarized key points that applicable to all industries.
See on business.time.com
Creating a Customer Service Officers Program
When trying to implement a customer service transformational strategy across an organization, you can expect a number of hurdles to arise which could slow down its implementation at various levels within the organization. Some examples of these hurdles are departmental processes, individual leaders or a change-adverse culture. Thus, in order for a strategy to be completely adopted, you need to elicit stakeholders to push it forward.
That is why I created the Customer Service Officers program within the City of Philadelphia’s customer service initiative. The primary responsibilities of the Customer Service Officer’s role are to:
- Support departments to achieve their respective customer goals and key performance objectives
- Implement appropriate actions towards improvement in their departments
Including departmental Customer Service Officers (CSO) within a strategic initiative not only offers a specified liaison between the Chief Customer Service Officer and the department but it also provides the initiative with an “expert” in specific departments. With this model, each CSO can bring insight and make recommendations that will help the initiative survive in individual departments.
In the City of Philadelphia Customer Service Officers Program, CSO’s create the following materials which are unique to their department:
- Vision and Mission Statements for Customer Service
- “Voice of the Customer Program” Process to Identify and Prioritize Customers’ Needs and Wants to Improve Service Quality
- Customer Service Training Program
- Customer Feedback and Engagement
While it might seem that this approach will create a fragmented customer service initiative across our organization, it is my responsibility as a Chief Customer Service Officer to make sure these deliverables are consistent with the higher-level plan. This approach, however, provides the overall effort with a department-level expert in the planning stage and a liaison throughout its implementation.
What programs do you currently have in place to ensure the organization is executing your customer service plans and initiatives? Help Rosetta out by leaving your suggestions in the comments below and the best answer will be rewarded with a $5 Starbucks gift card.
Innovative Customer Service Leadership Strategies 