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Train yourself to sub-consciously assess customer service given by any business and learn to become an expert...

Train Yourself to Become an Expert on Customer Service

You don’t need costly complicated sales training to show you the consequences of giving poor customer service for your business.

You don’t need to invest in the services of expensive business consultants to show the potential returns on investing in giving a good service to your customers.

Take a look around you, you’re a customer, train yourself look out for examples of how businesses treat you.

Judge for yourself if they are making money or losing it as a result of the service they offer.

Afterwards, go inside and think about how you feel. You won’t get that first hand sensory reaction from any sales training book. Then compare what you experienced with the service you give your customers and imagine how they feel about your business.

Once you train yourself to look for these examples it will become an automatic sub-conscious skill that will help you make some great business decisions in the future.

Here’s an example of how it works:

Last weekend I went to a cinema. As a salesman I’m always looking for the service offered by any business I interact with. After a few times of telling myself to do this it became automatic and I rate my experience without thinking about it.

I drove to the cinema and the car park was full. This meant parking a ten minute walk away in a not too secure location, so straight away I’m thinking that when they built the place they didn’t consider if there was enough parking at busy times for me, the customer.

I wonder if they even know the car park was full, what are they doing about it, and most importantly from a customer service perspective; do they care.

We enter the cinema and go to the bar for a drink before the film. One person serving so a queue of people is forming. He’s not that quick and both he starts apologising and making more mistakes as the pressure grows.

We get the drinks and sit down. It looks like has been showing because the bar area looks like there’s been a party and no one has cleaned up yet. There are bits of food on chairs and tables, no staff around, no one doing anything about the mess.

How do I feel as a customer

Next time I might look for a cinema with a bigger car park where I know I won’t have to walk. So the cinema could have lost a customer. I certainly won’t be going into the bar area as the customer service was really poor, so if I do again the business has lost revenue.

As one customer my small amount of revenue won’t mean much to the business but if I felt like that you can be sure many others did as well. To put these problems right would cost money but it would also increase the number of customers and the revenue from those customers.

Carefully planned investment would give a return. It wouldn’t have cost much extra to have flexible staff that can move from one area to another when needed.

How does this help you

You’re a sales person, a business owner, or you mange sales people. Train yourself to judge and assess the customer service offered by any business you interact with in your work or personal life.

After visiting the cinema I asked myself what I could learn from the experience.

The first answer that came to me was related to the flexibility of my team. I’ve got people in different roles and if business increased, or people go off sick, are my staff all able to move in to other roles if needed. Can they work flexibly.

The manager at the cinema may not have been aware of the parking issues, the queues at the bar, or the mess in the bar area. Are there problems with parts of my business that I’m not aware about. Maybe it’s time I did some investigating from a customer’s perspective and get firsthand experience of how phone calls are answered and how we interact with our customers.

Train yourself to become an expert on customer service. Become a critic, become aware of how you feel when interacting with businesses, and you will learn a lot of great tips and techniques to improve your business and increase sales.

To see more sales training with a different viewpoint take a look at our Sales Training Website...