Extreme Customer Service

That’s the headline on the cover of the March 2 Business Week.

It caught my eye, since this is a topic we talk about frequently, both among our team members and with our clients. We’re all focusing on doing the little things – and sometimes the big things – to make sure we’re taking good care of the clients we have. That’s reflected in the actual title of the Business Week article, “When Service Means Survival.”

The article leads with a story about a customer of Hertz rental cars. He’s a loyal customer – until he can no longer find someone to check him in quickly with the hand-held, run-to-your-car approach during a rental return. The problem? Recent layoffs left the company short staffed and no one was available to do curbside returns. The result? A loyal customer is now looking to switch rental car companies. As we all know, when getting to the plane, every minute counts.

The problem comes when a company is faced with a need to downsize its work force. Companies with the best customer service satisfaction – many of whom have been through downturns before – know that sacrificing in this area will have long-term results, both in reputation and name awareness.

The solution is to get more out of the customer service people you’ve got by cross-training and providing them with tools to do even more for customers.

In the senior care business this may mean making sure all staff who interact with the public – from receptionist and wait staff to maintenance people and management – are trained to handle questions quickly and efficiently and resolve problems. It may mean preparing your staff to wear multiple hats, too. Receptionists helping wait tables, housekeepers answering phones – these are the sort of cross-over tasks that top-performers are training and preparing their staff to take on with even greater competence and efficiency.

The truly savvy manager will lead by example, motivating employees to cross out of their typical job role to an area that may be outside their comfort zone - all in the name of exceptional customer service. Staff who see the Executive Director busing tables, for example, likely won't be thinking the job is beneath them.

Going the extra mile means getting the top level execs involved, too. One anecdote in the article mentioned a woman who was waiting for a UPS delivery that was very late. She happened to be an avid social networker – a person who lets her circle of friends know exactly what’s happening with her by using a program called Twitter. This program sends out text messages in real time to subscribers. This individual sent out a tweet (a twitter message) that she was getting very frustrated with UPS. One recipient happened to be a corporate exec of another company, having dinner with UPS’s CEO. The CEO got on the phone to the unhappy customer, connected her with the right people who scheduled her delivery at a satisfactory time, creating one very happy customer.

My guess? Hundreds – if not thousands – of people heard about this. One customer’s loyalty grew stronger; many others heard about it.

Today, perhaps more than ever, customers expect to be treated like royalty. They know that we need and value their business, and they expect to be shown respect in every transaction. Training your team – top to bottom – in providing “extreme customer service” is not a luxury. It’s a business essential.

aQuire Training offers customer service training for your frontline staff as well as managers. We’ll also assist you in building unique online customer service training that communicates your company’s message throughout your communities. Contact us to learn more!

It’s STILL all about retention

This is the richest hiring market I can remember – it’s exciting. We had the need for an additional online course developer, so I reluctantly placed my standard Craig’s list ad. Hiring new people into this level of a job isn’t fun for me, typically. I know that our needs are unique and that few people even know what we do, let alone already know how to do it.

I was thrilled, frankly, with the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of applicants. It ended up being a fun process: I did a very quick sort based on a 5 second read of resumes; all the ones that went into the “basically qualified” pile got an email from me asking them to provide a work sample based on a couple of paragraphs I sent to them. We used a free website for them to load their projects, and they sent me the link to their work sample. We ended up with 30 applicants willing to spend at least 2 hours developing a work sample, loading it onto a sharing site and sending me their link. I limited the size of the work sample so each one only took a few minutes to view, and, from there, we were able to narrow it down to 8 people who seemed to really “get it.”

This week, our new hire started. He not only comes to us with a master’s degree in educational design but also with years of online course development expertise. Most important for me was his intense interest in educating for careers in health. All together, this is an employee who would have been out of my reach at any other time in history (at least since computers have been around)!

You, like me, may be excited about the caliber of new employees you’re gaining. But probably, like me, you’re hearing the voice in your head say, “Yeah, but how are you going to keep them?”

Even though today we can hire them – tomorrow, can we keep them?

One of our clients called us to talk about adding more employees to his online training program. He was excited about the success of the program and started telling us about what he’s doing to hire better – and keep them.

He’s being careful to craft help-wanted ads that aim to a higher applicant, including a requirement for basic computer skills. He also notes that online training is a work benefit. He makes sure all new hires can complete at least a few online courses in the appropriate amount of time (as a part of their probationary period); if not, they’re out. If they pass this test, he assigns them 4-6 hours of training online right away, and then gives them access to all the courses we offer to his group. As he says, he's training his new people right, from the beginning and he's not investing one-on-one instructor time with them - he couldn't afford it.

Of course, he’s also doing other things to make his community a compelling place to work, but his results are exciting. Here’s what Rod says, “Since we’ve started this program we have not lost one new employee – not one!”

I’ve asked Rod to share more of his experience in retention and what he’s doing to make it work; watch for a guest article in the near future.

There are some great opportunities in the middle of this particular crisis. Clearly, we need to do a better job, as an industry, with the retention side of the equation if we’re going to be able to truly benefit from these opportunities.

Retaining your team: Is your organization a compelling place to work?

I listened to a short “teaser” webcast today for an upcoming conference. Even though the conference isn’t on my list of “must-dos” this year, I loved the title of the session:

“Will they stay or will they stray: Strategies that engage people with programs and organizations.”

The point of the presentation is to get organizations to look at their retention strategies now – when they don’t have to – to prepare for the inevitable next phase when their very survival will depend on retaining valuable human assets.

One of the key points the speaker made was simply this: what makes your company a compelling employer is much the same as what makes e-learning for your team a compelling business decision today.

Did I lose you on that statement? Ask yourself these questions:

Is your company merely “compliant”? That is, does it deliver the essential product the employee needs to stay there – a paycheck – or it is a compelling place to work, engaging the heart and soul of the team?

Are you focused on simply sustaining business as usual (please, God, don’t let it be less than that) – or are you focused on business: better?

Are you taking this respite from rapid expansion and acquisition to focus on the intangibles of business – the very things that will help you achieve long-term success: quality service, keeping customers, building loyalty?

Are you targeting a strategic plan for managing risk and achieving 100% compliance with regulations, company-wide?

Do you bring in high-caliber (high-cost) trainers for that special session on leadership development or are you creating a sustainable culture of learning and personal/professional growth within your organization?

Does every single member of your team – every shift, every location – have clarity of purpose in their job?

It’s an excellent time to take a measure of your organization – and your approach to building the best team possible.

Are you – is your training – compelling? Or merely compliant? At the end of the day, it may well determine if you get your best and brightest human assets to stay – or whether they’ll chose to stray.

HR opportunity and challenges: planning for the future today

Yesterday I met with the staff development and human resources managers at a nursing facility that has just signed on to use our online CNA training program. It’s always fun to talk with managers who are excited about their work, and excited about introducing online learning to their team.

We talked about how many people they had applying for training – more than they’ve ever had before. The local community college had called them to see if they could train even more students, since they had over 400 applicants for their college-sponsored CNA training course.

It was refreshing to hear these people talk about the realities of the current hiring climate. They realized that it’s one thing to hire people; it’s another thing to retain them, especially when the economy swings – and it will, sooner or later, swing.

These individuals recognize that today they have an opportunity to hire an unusually high level of talent. We all remember the days – seems like yesterday – when we were into the “any warm body” mode of hiring, simply to fill essential positions.

We have a window of opportunity to hire exceptional people and create an environment for them to bond with us. Hopefully, we can help them fall in love with caring for seniors like we love it. We can help them find the rewards that come with making a difference in the lives of people, not just selling coffee or burgers for an extra 25 cents an hour.

In our online training programs we focus a lot on the emotional aspect of learning. We believe that people don’t truly master the caring skills unless they also begin to internalize the compassion for caring. We want them to fall in love with their job and with their clients.

These managers, completely new to the idea of online training for caregivers, are excited about offering something new; something different. They’re excited about being perceived as a company that is willing to adopt new technology to improve the level of training, and to achieve a cost-effective solution to necessary training.

They believe, as we do, that these are a few of the steps they can take to build a team – today – that will stay even when the job outlook improves and they can make more money elsewhere.