Interview with John Tschohl - Engagement Key to Service
In today’s competitive marketplace, customers are demanding rich, compelling and courteous interactions and they won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere if they don’t get the level and quality of service experience that they want and expect.
We recently had the pleasure of interviewing John Tschohl, a renowned customer service guru and the founder of the Service Quality Institute. The Service Quality Institute is an organization that designs innovative customer service training programs and tools. They are a leader in helping organizations keep customers, build market share, increase sales and reduce costs.During the interview, we asked John about the importance of engaged employees in delivering the customer experience – every day, in every interaction. John had some very important insights that we believe many companies would benefit from when trying to implement and successfully execute a customer service experience.
While we asked John a number of questions, we have focused this blog on his answers to two of our questions:
Employee engagement has become a critical factor in delivering exceptional service experiences. What do you think companies can do to foster employee engagement?
- Train employees on how to treat every customer as special. Customer service is not something that you can train employees on for a couple of hours and expect them to instantly “get it”. In order for employees to really understand how to treat every customer as special they must be continually trained and educated on what is expected.
- The service program must be kept new and fresh. Employees must be trained on an ongoing basis and the material must be kept interesting and fresh. It is essential that you not only capture the employees’ attention, but help them to understand what to do and how to do it.
- Empower your employees. Companies must train and empower employees to make decisions in favor of the customer – “not nickel and diming them”.
- Hire the right people. Successful companies hire 1 out of 50 or 1 out of 100 applicants. They are looking for people that “love the customer”. Commerce Bancorp (well known for service excellence) would never hire someone that failed to smile during the interview.
- It’s all about execution. If you can execute you “win the game”. It’s not really that complicated, but many fail to really master the fundamentals and to continually train and educate their staff on what it takes to treat every customer as special.
How can employees become more engaged and committed?
We loved John’s response to this question. Here he emphasized the importance of the employee taking ownership for their role in delivering the experience. According to John there are six elements to employee engagement:
- Feel good about yourself. “How you feel impacts how you will communicate.”
- Practice habits of courtesy, including the greeting and the smile.
- Practice habits of positive communication. Focus on your verbal and non-verbal communication and the messages sent to those you interact with.
- Always, do what you say you will do.
- Ask questions and listen.
- Become more knowledgeable by learning about the products and services your company offers.
Thank you John for this very powerful and insightful interview. We think that far too many companies lose sight of the fact that employee engagement is a two-way street. The company must provide the employee with the skills, tools and training to engage the employee to deliver the experience. But equally, the employee must take responsibility for their own engagement.
Let us know what you think!
