Customer Service Skills Training—Why Your People Need It
by Robert S. Last for HDI®
Training increases productivity and morale and that is good for your customers and your costs. One study indicates that "...employees who receive formal job training reach 'standard' performance levels faster (72 percent faster), generate less waste (70 percent less), and are better at customer troubleshooting (130 percent better) than employees who learn their jobs through the time-honored, but highly inefficient 'watch Jill for a few hours, and then we'll turn you loose on customer's' approach."1
Training in soft skills is now an industry standard. The 2006 HDI Practices & Salary Survey indicates that soft skills rank the highest in importance for HDI members:
Most Important Qualities in a Support Person2
* Customer Service Skills 98.2%
* Technical Skills 66.1%
* Soft Skills Certification 19.3%
* Technical Certifications 7.6%
Training provides both short-term and long-term benefits. Using customer service skills consistently has three benefits; two immediate and one long-term:
1. It allows the support center analyst to gather information from the user faster and more accurately. This leads to the resolution of a problem more quickly, which makes for a happier customer! As the old sales training phrase says, "They don't care what you know, until they know you care!"
2. It leaves the customer with a feeling of satisfaction. Every IT user has a choice about whom they contact when they have a question or a problem. They can contact the people they are supposed to contact (the help desk or the support center) or they can contact the informal support or underground support network. These are usually the people whose primary job has nothing to do with technical support, but are knowledgeable enough about it that they get asked questions anyway. There is a cost to this network, between $6,000-$15,000 per year, per employee, depending upon the complexity of the problem.3
3. Good service is good for profitability. A study by the Strategic Planning Institute shows that companies that focus on customer satisfaction retain their customers 50 percent longer and spend 20 to 40 percent less on marketing.4
Customers will like your organization more when they work with well-trained and service-oriented support analysts. Unhappy customers have a viral effect on a business or organization’s reputation. The rule of thumb for measuring the impact of an unhappy customer was developed almost twenty years ago (before the Internet, cell phones, IM, and the twenty-four hour news cycle. It is presented below:
* The White House Office of Consumer Affairs says for every customer that bothers to complain, there are twenty-six others that remain silent;
* The average "wronged" customer will tell eight to sixteen more people about the negative experience (that's a number derived before the Internet was being used—now estimates of how many people one of us will tell is in the thousands);
* Some 91 percent of unhappy customers will never buy from you again;
* Eighty-five percent of lost customers result because, "They just don't care about me or my business;"5
* Sixty-eight percent of customer defection takes place because customers feel poorly treated;
* It can cost five times more to buy new customers than retain existing ones;
* Reducing customer defections can boost profits by 25-85 percent. In 73 percent of cases, the organization made no attempt to persuade dissatisfied customers to stay; even 35 percent said that a simple apology would have prevented them from moving to the competition;
* One percent cut in customer problems could generate an extra million in profits for a medium-sized company over five years.6
1 Karl Albrecht and Ron Zemke, Service America in the New Economy, (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2002), p. 159. They cite the famous article, "Implications of Corporate Culture: A Manager's
Guide to Action," in Organizational Dynamics, Autumn 1983, page 8.
2 Richard Hand, HDI 2006 Practices and Salary Survey, (Colorado Springs, CO: HDI, 2007), 68.
3 "Ask the Expert" STI Advisory Services, URL: http://www.thinkhdi.com/library/filedetails.
aspx?id=795.
4 Richard S. Gallagher, Smile Training Isn't Enough, (Grants Pass, Oregon: The Oasis Press, 1998), 2.
5 "Why you should care about customer loyalty?" JoAnna Brandi & Company,
URL: http://www.customerrentention.com/loyalty.asp, Retrieved on July 26, 2007.
6 "Customer Service Facts," CSM e-magazine for Customer Service Professionals. Retrieved
July 26, 2007. URL: http://www.customerservicemanager.com/customer-service-facts.htm.
To read more about customer service skills training, see HDI's focus book, Understanding the Business Value of Customer Service Skills in Technical Support by Robert S. Last. This book is available on the HDI eStore at www.thinkhdiestore.com.
