Here's Your Next Level Customer Service Action Plan

You sense an opportunity to improve customer service.

Not that your team’s customer service is bad. It’s pretty good, actually. It’s just that it could be better. 

The promise of taking customer service to the next level is alluring. Happier customers equals more referrals, increased customer retention, and ultimately more revenue. It costs less to serve happy customers. It’s also a lot more fun.

But, where do you start?

This is a common question for customer service leaders. There’s a whole universe full of ideas out there. You can find customer service blogs, books, and videos galore. Everyone has advice and much of it makes at least some sense.

Distilling this information down to a few key actions isn’t easy.

That’s why I’ve compiled this action plan to help. It contains essential steps that you can take to elevate your team’s service. Links to tools and resources are also included. 

Next Level Customer Service Action Plan

Step 1: Define Outstanding Service

The first and most important step is to define outstanding customer service. Every employee must share the same definition and be able to describe how the definition applies to them. You can use my step-by-step guide to help create your definition.

Step 2: Measure Outstanding Service

You have to be able to measure something if you want to improve it. Setting a SMART goal for customer service will allow you to track progress and can help motivate the team. Here’s a worksheet you can use to help you set SMART goals. 

Step 3: Align Your Team Towards Outstanding Service

This step involves making sure your basic functions are all pointed towards outstanding customer service. Like a car that's out of alignment, it's difficult to keep your team heading in the right direction when parts are misaligned. You can use this Customer Service Alignment Check to review your team.

Step 4: Look for quick fixes

A lot of customer service challenges can be solved very quickly if you know where to look. Use the Quick Fix Checklist and diagnose the root causes of customer service problems. 

Step 5: Analyze Voice of Customer Data

Your customers can help you pinpoint a lot of problems, but having a customer satisfaction survey isn’t enough. You need to make sure you’re asking the right questions and then extracting meaningful insight from the results. 

Here are a series of blog posts that provide step-by-step instructions on developing an effective Voice of the Customer (VOC) program:

• Developing Effective Customer Satisfaction Surveys

• The Killer Three Question Customer Service Survey

• 5 Ways to Capture VOC Data Without a Survey

• How to Analyze and Act on CSAT Data

• Why You Should Stop Trying to Improve Your Survey Scores

If you have access to LinkedIn Learning, you can check out my course, Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service. Here’s a short preview:

Welcome from Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service by Jeff Toister

Step 6: Find Hidden Obstacles

There are a lot of hidden and even counter-intuitive obstacles that can make it hard for employees to deliver outstanding customer service. My book, Getting Service Right, reveals ten of the most common obstacles and provides practical advice for overcoming each one. 

Step 7: Provide Customer Service Training

Notice that training is number 7 on the list, not number 1. This isn't an accident. A lot of problems can be solved without training.

Sometimes, employees do need new skills to take their service to the next levels. You can access training-related posts on my blog or take my Customer Service Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning.

Step 8: Constantly Reinforce Outstanding Service

Taking your team’s service to the next level isn’t just a one-time project. It’s an ongoing process that needs constant reinforcement. Here’s a blog post I wrote on ten ways to reinforce outstanding customer service. 

You can also sign your employees up to receive my free Customer Service Tip of the Week email.

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Five Reasons Why Customer Service is Hard

Note: This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Customer service is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is in denial, bad at it, or both. The notion that serving customers is easy is something I’ve referred to as the Biggest Myth in Customer Service.

There are many reasons why customer service isn’t easy. These obstacles range from poor corporate strategy to ineffective leadership to our own limitations as human beings.

Here are five common examples:

#1 It’s not instinctive

There are many situations where our natural instincts result in the wrong customer service move.

For example, if you encounter an angry or upset person, your “fight or flight” instinct will kick in. This is a natural urge to either fight the danger (verbally or physically) or flee the danger. Neither is acceptable in customer service, so employees wind up struggling against their own instincts when they try to make the upset customer happy again.

#2 Our customers see what we don't

People tend to get locked in to a certain perspective, but this perspective may not match our customer’s. This can cause us to be blind to a customer's need that might be obvious in hindsight.

The classic nine dot puzzle provides an example of how this naturally happens.

• Connect all nine dots using just four straight lines.
• You can't lift your finger off the screen

If you get stumped, click here to find the solution.

#3 It's sometimes hard to be friendly

Customer service employees are supposed to be friendly, but what happens when an employee doesn’t feel friendly?

It takes effort to outwardly project a feeling you don’t really feel. The worse you actually feel, the harder it gets to pretend you're in a good mood. This effort, called emotional labor, can leave people physically and mentally exhausted.

To add insult to injury, research shows that customer service employees don’t get paid very much for their emotional labor.

#4 We aren’t good at multitasking

Multitasking is a requirement for many customer service jobs. Unfortunately, we’re not very good at it. The end result is multitasking hurts service quality.

That’s because our brains can only process one conscious thought at a time. When we try to do more, we’re really just rapidly shifting resources between various thoughts. The inevitable result is we operate slower and are more prone to making mistakes.

#5 Directed Attention Fatigue

All of this chronic multitasking causes a condition called Directed Attention Fatigue. It comes from overusing the part of our brain that focuses attention.

Here are a few of the symptoms:

• Distractibility
• Irritability
• Impatience
• Indecisiveness
• Difficulty starting and finishing tasks

Obviously, none of these symptoms are good for customer service. You can read more about it in a blog post I wrote called “How detoxing our brains can improve customer service.”

What can you do about it?

Start by embracing the fact that customer service is difficult. If you want to serve your customers at the highest level, you have to work at it every day.

Next, slow down and focus on one customer at a time. The obstacles described above get exacerbated when we get anxious and try to do too many things at once.

Finally, learn from experience. When you encounter a challenging customer service situation, think about what you'll do differently next time to get a better result.

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One Thing That Makes Multitasking Five Times More Dangerous

Multitasking and customer service don’t mix.

New research suggests there’s one thing in particular that degrades our ability to juggle multiple tasks at once. It is helpful to cover a little background first, but here’s a short riddle that will give you a hint:

Add one hundred forty eight plus nine hundred twenty three. Remember the sum and you’ve found the key.

Got it? 

Remember your answer and keep reading. (Don’t cheat and write it down!)

Background

Multitasking causes a lot of service failures. 

It’s covered extensively in Chapter 7 of my book Service Failure. You can also read more in a blog post I wrote about why multitasking hurts customer service.

Here’s a summary of what we know:

• We can only process one conscious thought at a time
• Multitasking slows us down
• We make more errors when we multitask

Even more ominous, chronic multitasking can lead to a condition called Directed Attention Fatigue or DAF. Psychologists have found that DAF symptoms are strikingly similar to people with ADD.

One Thing That Makes it Worse

Now, don’t go back and peek at the riddle. Do you remember the answer?

The real answer to the riddle is short-term memory. It turns out that engaging our short-term memory makes the negative impact of multitasking much worse. For example, reading this post for understanding and retention becomes more difficult if you simultaneously try to remember the answer to the math problem.

This new finding about short-term memory comes from a 2013 study on distracted driving commissioned by the AAA Foundation. The study produced a cognitive distraction scale that shows the level of distraction caused by various activities conducted while driving.

Drivers were five times more distracted when attempting to complete an OSPAN task. OSPAN refers to a series of tasks that required participants to solve math problems while remembering words. It’s difficult enough by itself, but things get really tough while driving.

Drivers were still three times more distracted when completing the speech-to-text task. This required them to listen to an email or text while driving and then dictate a response to the vehicle's onboard infotainment system. This particular task might be analogous to talking on the phone with a customer while searching the web for an unrelated item.

The study found that any level of multitasking-induced distraction caused two dangerous problems for drivers:

• Diminished reaction times
• Less likely to recognize hazards

Customer Service Implications

We already know that multitasking hurts customer service. These new findings suggest that multitasking while engaging our short-term memory is a recipe for disaster.

Here’s a typical example:

A retail employee is juggling inbound phone calls while serving customers waiting in line. She takes a phone call from a customer whose issue requires one of her co-workers to do some research. Her co-worker is currently at lunch, so she promises the customer a call back later in the day.

The employee works hard to focus her attention on each individual customer as she handles multiple phone and in-person inquiries at once. By the time her co-worker returns from lunch, the message she intended to pass along has been forgotten.

How could this failure be prevented? 

The simplest fix is to put the message for her co-worker in writing so she doesn’t need to remember it. This works well if there’s already an established messaging system such as email, a CRM system, or even a physical inbox.

In busy customer service settings like this, it’s natural to give customers your divided attention, so you may miss something important. The employee could set a specific intention to each customer her undivided attention. Environments like this one that are full of distractions require extra effort to concentrate on just one customer at a time.

Finally, the employee might try to create an attention procedure for herself. This works by periodically altering her focus to look for any loose ends. For example, she might step away from the service counter, take a deep breath, and scan the area for any customer service needs that have been missed. Employees who do this are much more likely to remember issues that had previously forgotten.

Bonus Resources

Focusing on customers isn’t easy. Jenny Dempsey, Customer Success Manager at Phone.com, has been chronicling her attempt to focus more at work. Her blog posts are definitely worth a read. 

You may also be interested in seeing a short video on the AAA distracted driving study. One thing that stood out were the participants who all thought they were good drivers, including one person who had several traffic tickets and recent accident.

2014 Contact Center Expo and Conference Re-cap

ICMI's newly re-branded Contact Center Expo and Conference came to my hometown of San Diego last week. More than 1,500 contact center professionals were in attendance to network, learn, and share ideas.

This conference was particularly important to me since I was a newly minted member of ICMI’s Advisory Board. This group is responsible for advising ICMI on the conference content. The Contact Center Expo and Conference was the first event I had been a part of.

Here’s a re-cap of some of the conference highlights along with links to additional resources.

Conference Overview

You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference if you didn’t attend.

• Twitter Backchannel (Tip: you don't need a Twitter account to view the conversation)
• Conference Overview
• Session Descriptions 

ICMI’s Erica Strother also put together an excellent daily re-cap of the conference:

• #CCExpo14 Insider: Day 1
• #CCExpo14 Insider: Day 2
• #CCExpo14 Insider: Day 3

A special thank you is also due to Voiance Language Services for giving away copies of my book, Service Failure, in the Expo Hall. 

Conference Highlights

There were a few aspects of the conference that really stood out.

Matt Dixon’s Keynote

The third day of the conference kicked off with an outstanding keynote presentation from Matt Dixon from CEB. 

In his keynote, Dixon shared compelling research from his new book, The Effortless Experience. Dixon suggested that preventing service failures was better a customer service strategy than delighting customers. That's because negative service had nearly 4 times the impact on loyalty than outstanding service.

Thought Leader Panels

These were short, 20 minute panel discussions in the Expo hall. This popular feature was a hit at last year’s conference and I’m glad ICMI brought them back. It was a great way to get insight on a particular topic from a cross-section of experts and then network with them immediately afterwards. 

Look for ICMI to post videos of each panel discussion on their YouTube channel in the coming weeks.

Contact Center Awards

ICMI hosted the second annual Contact Center Awards banquet at the conference. The awards recognized excellence in a broad array of categories, ranging from best contact center agent to contact center of the year. 

I had the honor of being one of the judges for the Best Contact Center Supervisor award. It was great to be on hand when Brock Faucette from the AICPA heard his name called.

Will you be there next year?

The conference will be in Orlando, FL next year May 4 - 7. My calendar is already marked!

The Most Important Customer Need Is Often Overlooked

Note: This post was originally published on the AMA Playbook Blog.

Customers have two types of basic needs. Unfortunately, it’s the most important need that often gets overlooked when dealing with these customer needs.

The first need is rational. A rational need is the specific service a customer is requesting. For example, a customer might call a software company for technical support because they can’t get their software to work properly.

The second need is emotional. An emotional need is how the customer feels about the situation. They might be frustrated that the software isn’t working. Perhaps they’re anxious because the problem is preventing them from getting important work done.

Customer service reps are usually good at spotting rational needs, but emotional needs are easily missed. That’s because the rational need is connected to action. Helping the customer fix their software is what the technical support rep does. The rep doesn’t feel the customer’s emotions, so they’re more difficult to spot.

Here’s the rub

 It’s the emotional needs that can make or break the customer’s experience. If the technical support rep can successfully validate the customer’s frustration by empathizing with them and then reassure the customer that they can help them, the customer will likely feel better. On the other hand, the customer won’t be happy if their software gets fixed but they’re annoyed and frustrated by the process.

Research conducted by Bård Tronvoll at Hedmark University College in Norway reveals that 97 percent of service failures also result in negative emotions for customers.

These negative emotions must be addressed since it’s ultimately how customers feel about your service that determines whether or not they’ll come back. For example, a survey of airline passengers whose flights were cancelled showed that how the cancellation was handled had more than twice the impact on customer satisfaction as the cancellation itself.

Spotting and reacting to customers’ emotional needs can take a little practice. Here are three techniques that can help you develop your skills.

1. Tune in. Many people miss their customers’ emotions because they’re just not looking for them. Try to be mindful of the emotions your customers’ might be feeling. Pay close attention to their body language and tone of voice to find clues that reveal their emotions.
2. Prioritize emotional needs. How customers feel about your service is ultimately more important than the actual service you provide, so make emotions the top priority when serving customers. Let an angry customer vent before solving their problem. Reassure a confused customer before helping them out. Share a laugh with an upbeat, light-hearted customer before getting down to business.
3. Refocus on solutions. When there is a problem that makes a customer angry, try to avoid focusing on blame. Dwelling on the source of negative emotions often makes them even worse. Acknowledge your customers’ emotions to validate their feelings and then refocus the conversation on finding a solution and making them feel better.

Identifying and taking care of your customer needs emotionally isn’t always easy, but it’s a skill that can help elevate your customer service and leave a lasting impression.

Book Review: What Great Brands Do

Buy on Amazon

Denise Lee Yohn’s new book isn’t just for marketing people. 

The central message of What Great Brands Do is that developing a well-respected brand goes way beyond marketing. A strong brand serves as a central theme for how the entire business is run.

Yohn lays out seven key principles in her book:

• Great brands start inside
• Great brands avoid selling products
• Great brands ignore trends
• Great brands don’t chase customers
• Great brands sweat the small stuff
• Great brands commit and stay committed
• Great brands never have to “give back”

I found myself taking pages of notes as I read the book. Perhaps it was because many of Yohn’s branding philosophies align squarely with my own thinking for customer service. It may also be her engaging writing style that uses a blend of real-life examples and practical exercises to help the reader understand each concept.

What's the connection to customer service?

Customer service is ultimately part of a company's brand. What a company promises must ultimately match the service its customers receive for a brand to be authentic. As I pointed out in a recent blog post, you can't advertise your way to great service.

This book is highly recommended for any business leader. It’s available in hardcover and e-book format from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Five Tips to Attend a Conference Like a Pro

Two of my worlds will be at conferences next week.

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is holding their International Conference and Exposition in Washington, DC May 4 - 7. ICMI's Contact Center Expo & Conference will be in San Diego May 6 - 9.

Attending a conference can be an overwhelming experience. Four years ago, I wrote a post outlining five steps to attending a conference. My favorite? Step 1: set goals so you can focus on finding what you're looking for.

Here are five new tips to help you maximize your experience.

Tip 1: Set goals

Ok, this is a repeat from my last list. It's just that it's the best way to maximize your experience.

• What problems can attending this conference help you solve?
• What speakers or attendees do you want to meet?
• What would make this conference easy to justify to your boss?

Failing to set goals for a conference is like going to a buffet and filling up on bread because it was the first thing you saw and there was lots of it. Save room in your brain and your schedule for desert. 

Tip 2: Follow on Twitter

Most conferences have a hashtag that allows you to tune in on Twitter. This has become the town square for conference attendees. People talk about their favorite sessions, share resources, and exchange ideas.

Twitter is also a great way to stay awake during information-rich, interaction-poor PowerPoint dump sessions. 

Here are the hashtags for the ASTD & ICMI Conferences:

• ASTD: #astd2014
• ICMI: #ccexpo14

Check out the hashtag stream for #astd2014.

Tweets about "#astd2014"

Tip 3: Split Up

Attending a conference with a co-worker attached to your side can be stifling. Sure, there's safety in numbers, but now is not the time to spend even more time with someone you spend enough time with as it is.

Split up and do your own thing. Here's why:

• You can attend more sessions if you divide and conquer.
• It's easier to make new connections if you aren't all huddled together.
• You spend too much time together as it is. 

Tip 4: Make Real Connections

There are two ways to network at a conference.

The wrong way is to swap business cards with everyone you meet and then never talk to those people again. This is what most people do. 

A much better approach is to make meaningful connections with people who can actually help you (and vice-versa). Here are a few people to look for:

• People who have already solved a problem you're trying to solve.
• Vendors who are selling a solution you actually need.
• People in similar situations who are willing to benchmark.

The key to making this thing work is you must follow-up after the conference. Reach out via LinkedIn. Send them an email. Make a phone call. Whatever you do, continue the conversation.

Tip 5: Fewer Sessions, More Conversation

The best conferences I've ever attended all have one thing in common: conversation.

Conference sessions can be great. I highly recommend attending a few. Just give yourself permission to skip a session or two in favor of a meaningful conversation with someone you meet at the conference.

I almost always gain far more from talking to an expert one-on-one about a real world challenge than I do trying to keep up with a presenter monotonously droning through 150 densely packed slides in an hour. 

Connect with Me at ICMI!

The logistics of my two favorite conferences forced me to choose one over the other. That means I'll be at the Contact Center Expo & Conference in my hometown of San Diego.

Here's how to find me if you'll be there too:

Tuesday, May 6

• 8:30am - 12:00pm: Pre-conference workshop: High Performance Management 

Wednesday, May 7

• 11:00am - 11:30am: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Voice of the Customer
• 11:30am - 12:00pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Online Chat
• 5:30pm - 6:00pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Training

Thursday, May 8:

• 12:00pm - 12:30pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Social
• 1:30pm - 2:00pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Multichannel
• 2:30pm - 3:45pm: Incentive Programs That Drive Performance (Panel Moderator)

Why Managers Don’t Make Customer Service a Priority

A recent study found that 93 percent of executives said customer experience was one of their top priorities. 

Saying something is a priority doesn’t necessarily make it true. Something is truly a priority if it receives time, money, and attention over other alternatives. 

It’s in these departments that many customer service managers fall short. And, when they do, it’s typically a problem caused by the executives they report to.

No Time for Service

According to a recent Forrester survey commissioned by Desk.com, executives believe the biggest challenge faced by their customer service managers is not having enough time to focus on strategic initiatives.

Look at some of the challenges the typical customer service manager faces on a daily basis:

• Too many direct reports
• Staffing shortages
• Hiring and training to fix staffing shortages
• Endless meetings
• Escalated customer service challenges

The first three issues are fundamentally tied to a lack of budget. 

The fourth issue, endless meetings, is a product of coordinating with other departments such as operations and marketing. These departments typically don’t view customer service as their top priority because it’s not baked into their job description.

The fifth issue, escalated customer service challenges, is a by-product of the first four issues. More issues get escalated when customer service managers aren’t able to spend enough time preventing problems from occurring.

Customer service managers want to spend more time on service, but they often don’t have that luxury.

No Money for Service

Customer service gets short-changed when it comes to investment.

That’s because customer service often represents a cost to executives who are focused on trimming budgets. Many customer service managers tell me they struggle to get the money they need for adequate staffing, training, or technology investments.

Here’s an example:

A company acquired a competitor that used a different system to manage customer billing. The decision was made save a substantial amount of money by delaying the integration of the two billing systems.

Having two separate systems also caused a substantial number of billing issues.

Executives can easily determine how much money they saved by not investing in the system integration. It’s much harder to calculate the real cost of the billing issues. To do so would require someone to spend time analyzing several factors.

• How many billing errors were caused by having two systems?
• What was the cost of these errors?
• What was the cost of fixing these errors (employee time, goodwill discounts, etc.)?
• How many customers were lost due to these errors?

Customer service managers in situations like these often find it difficult to make a successful business case. The data is hard to find and they have very little time to try to find it.

The inevitable result is they can’t get executive approval for the budget they need.

No Attention to Service

There are a million things competing for a customer service manager’s attention. 

• Endless deadlines
• Special projects
• An endless sea of emails and reports
• Customer escalations
• Employee issues such as hiring, monitoring, training, and coaching
• Meetings (most of which are pointless)

All of this requires managers to constantly multitask. 

The real impact of multitasking is divided attention. A manager whose attention is divided amongst a million little tasks has little capacity for paying attention to customer service.

I’ve talked to countless managers who feel like they’re stretched thin, barely keeping their heads above water. They want to focus on customer service. It’s just that they don’t have the ability to focus on improving customer service right now.

They would give customer service more attention if only their executives would give them the time and budget they need to do so.

How to Prioritize Service

There are a few things managers can do despite these challenges.

The first is to set aside a special time to jump start the effort. Think of it as spring cleaning for your customer service team. Here are a few sample activities:

• Create a customer service vision
• Analyze voice of customer data to pinpoint problems
• Conduct customer service training

The second thing managers can do is tackle one small issue at a time. Set yourself up for success by only taking on as much as you can handle.

The third thing managers can do is to integrate continuous improvement into daily work as much as possible. Things tend to lose their priority when they’re treated as side projects. You have to live and breathe customer service on a daily basis if you want it to be a priority.

Seven Ways to Be More Responsive to Email

Most of us are drowning in email.

The daily onslaught of email and inboxes containing 100+ messages make it hard to keep up with the old one business day standard. My 2014 email response time survey revealed that we may need to re-consider this standard.

Customers, co-workers, and even our friends expect us to respond even faster. 

I recently hosted a webinar that revealed seven ways to improve email response times. You can watch the full webinar here. 

This post is a re-cap of some of those tips. They’re geared for both personal use and for contact center teams.

Tip #1: Establish and Monitor Standards

This helps ensure accountability, whether you are doing it individually or as a team. Many people have standards, but far fewer actually monitor them. Checking regularly to ensure you are being responsive can help you identify and fix any problems.

Tip #2: Set Expectations for Emailers

For individuals, this involves setting your out of office message when you won’t be responding to emails in a timely manner. It’s amazing how many people don’t do this. Most people will understand if they receive an automated message that says you’re out of the office,

For businesses, this involves using a confirmation screen or an auto-response email that gives customers an estimate of how long it will take to receive a reply. It should also provide an option for a faster response, such as a phone number.

Tip #3: Staff to Demand

This tip is mainly for contact centers. Small teams typically have fairly consistent staffing, but email volumes are uneven. You can fix this by looking at your historical email data and aligning your team’s schedule with typical email volume.

Tip #4: Create Focus Time

Timothy Ferriss’s best selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek, makes a compelling case for dedicating time to focus on email. Most people chronically check email between tasks which actually slows us down. Blocking out time to concentrate on email, and then shutting your email program down, is actually much more productive.

Tip #5: Manage Your Inbox

Many an email message has gotten lost in a cluttered inbox. For individuals, managing your email box effectively requires you to make decisions about each message so nothing is left in your inbox for more than a day. For teams, this involves making sure someone takes ownership of the general inbox so nothing falls through the cracks. 

Tip #6: Keep it in Play

Some issues take longer to respond to than others. People tend to be pretty forgiving if you send a quick email to let them know you are still working on it and provide an estimate of when you’ll get back to them. 

Tip #7: Reduce Email Volume

Many people produce poorly written emails in their rush to slog through their inbox. The result is a lot of unnecessary email which in turn slows us down. You can reduce your email volume by taking the counter-intuitive step of slowing down and crafting more complete messages that will eliminate a lot of back and forth. (The webinar provides some fun examples.)

These tips are just scratching the surface. What else can individuals or teams do to improve email responsiveness?

Why Your Customer Service Training Needs to Flip

Flipped learning is hot topic in training circles. 

It has the potential to fix one of the most fundamental problems that plagues corporate training. Employees attend a training class, learn new skills, and then… Do nothing. 

Flipped learning changes that. It’s a trend that could be huge for customer service training.

What is flipped learning?

If you’re not familiar with the concept, the idea is to “flip” the traditional approach to instruction and application. 

Traditional training takes place with a facilitator in a classroom. Learners are then left to implement the skills on their own. E-learning takes place outside of a traditional classroom, but employees are still typically on their own when it comes to applying new skills on-the-job.

Flipped learning reverses this. 

Employees learn the skills or information on their own through e-learning or recorded video. The facilitator then works with employees to help them implement their new skills.

There’s a great overview article in the February 2014 issue of Training and Development magazine that provides even more background.

Why flip customer service training?

Flipping your customer service training offers three major benefits.

Save time. 

Flipped learning allows employees to learn specific lessons individually, so you don’t have to schedule everyone to be in the same place at the same time. Individual training also moves faster. For example, my Delivering Next Level Service course is 8 hours in the classroom, but my video-based Customer Service Fundamentals course is only 2 hours long.

Save money.

Flipped learning offers more bang for the buck. Here’s an illustrative example for a team of 25 people. It compares bringing in a consultant to facilitate a two-day training program versus subscribing employees to a video-based training library like lynda.com.

The example assumes you don’t have to pay other employees to cover your team while they’re in training or pay for a facility rental. These items could inflate your classroom training costs even higher.

Improve results.

Flipped learning offers superior results because it prioritizes implementation. 

A Zenger Folkman Group study found that 50 percent of learning occurs when employees try to implement new skills on the job. Traditional training approaches devote little to no attention to this phase. 

A flipped approach provides a facilitator, coach, or supervisor during the critical implementation phase to help ensure employees are successful.

Getting Started

There are two major obstacles to flipping your customer service training program.

The first is finding good content. Don’t settle for a monotonous voice droning on over a crappy PowerPoint. Here are three keys to look for:

• Engaging content that keeps your employees tuned in.
• Application exercises and activities to help employee apply what they learn.
• Content delivered in small chunks so employees can learn as they have time.

Fortunately, there are some quality options out there. 

For a professionally produced course, check out my new Customer Service Fundamentals course on lynda.com.

If you’d prefer to go the do-it-yourself route, there are some easy-to-use tools like Techsmith’s Camtasia that are very popular. (You can view a sample tutorial on setting SMART goals.)

The second challenge is implementation. 

It’s critical that employees have someone to coach them through implementing their new skills. This can be a supervisor, trainer, or a coach, but you can’t skimp on this part or the training will fail.

Here are some examples of implementation tools and activities that can help

• Select a specific customer service challenge for employees to work on
• Observe employees using the new skills on-the-job and provide feedback
• Discuss newly learned techniques in team meetings
• Have employees subscribe to the Customer Service Tip of the Week email
• Organize “lunch and learn” review sessions

These ideas are just scratching the surface.

Whatever you do, it ultimately comes down to leaders working closely with their employees on a daily basis. If you do that, the promise of flipped learning is incredibly powerful: Better learning and more results for less money.