Customer Expectations have Evolved, Has Your Service?

You own an online business? If yes, you can relate to the fact that awesome customer experience is pivotal for growth. Now, you have a team working on servicing your customers, but do they share the same passion you do for your service? Do they really know your product inside out? Can they answer and assist your customers with the minutest of their concerns, be it, technical or general? Do they know how your product stands out on the in the already crowded niche of yours?

It is impossible for the CEO to be able to connect with every one of his users. But isn’t every user equally important? Imagine one of your users asking your team a question like, What is the future of your product?—Are you sure your customer engagement team would be able to answer this? If you think they can’t, let me tell you this, you are missing out on a major chunk of potential customer conversion. On a very basic level your sales/marketing team is responsible making sure that a visitor of your website gets over his initial apprehensions about your product(s) and signs up. Making a statement of uniqueness, as to how your product differs from the one they are already using and how it will add value to their chain, is essential.

It is, if not before, now, an undeniable fact that your customer servicing heroes need to be trained extensively, empowered and be made superheroes to be able to carry your brand out there.

Now the question is how to do this?

Do you hold sessions in-house to train your agents every week? or outsource the job to a consultancy firm? Are you spending too much money or time on this? Let me share with you what Starbucks does… Starbucks occasionally shuts down for about 3 hours (Hey! That’s about 9000 stores for 3 hours.) Why? The CEO does a special training session for all of his employees on making the perfect cup of coffee. This along with some customer engagement training makes a powerful session. Every employee is invited and paid for attending these sessions. What is the cost of shutting down for 3 hours? What is the expenditure involved in rallying all those employees? ———The bigger question is, what would it cost Starbucks if these sessions are not held? Starbucks is an epic example showcasing the importance of customer engagement training to the world.

As Shep Hypen puts it “ It may cost a lot to train employees but it costs a lot more not to!”

Right information at right time! That is what customer needs and believe me each one of your competitors is working and spending tons of money on this.

Now, What if? and I’m just speculating here, there was a way where we could gami-fy the entire process of training? Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t it be insanely effective? and enjoyable? and productive? I’ll leave your imaginations to work on that for now. Keep looking forward to the next post to have a peek into my imagination!

If you find this concept interesting or have any better ways to simplify the process of employee training/adaptation, well, what are you waiting for? Let’s get talking…