If you’re in the field of train­ing cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives, or if your job descrip­tion con­tains the phrase “help improve cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion,” this post is for you. There is no short­age of infor­ma­tion on the web, in books, and from cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing com­pa­nies giv­ing tips on ways to improve cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. How­ever, before you can start to imple­ment a cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing pro­gram for your com­pany, you need to go back to the basics—you first need to lay a foun­da­tion for your staff.

It starts, actu­ally, with a dis­cus­sion on good-old fash­ioned man­ners. Yup. The lost art of courtesy.

How have we become so rude?

It seems that every gen­er­a­tion bemoans that the younger gen­er­a­tions are increas­ingly rude and dis­cour­te­ous. You can attribute their cur­rent lack of polite­ness to a vari­ety of fac­tors: they’re so “plugged” in that they fail to notice the per­son next to them, or, they’re always in a hurry and for­get how mean­ing­ful “please” and “thank you” can be—the list, and the­o­ries, abound.

Regard­less of the rea­sons, it’s inter­est­ing that it’s often note­wor­thy when peo­ple aren’t rude. Have you ever had an expe­ri­ence with a cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive who stood out—or who made you want to give the com­pany repeat business—because the rep­re­sen­ta­tive was incred­i­bly help­ful and cour­te­ous? If such encoun­ters hap­pen fre­quently, they prob­a­bly don’t stand out in your mind, but chances are, you notice it when you receive really polite service.

The good news is that peo­ple do take note when they’re treated excep­tion­ally well when deal­ing with com­pa­nies.  In fact, these cus­tomers often write about their cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion online. Pub­lic endorse­ments for your com­pany? Not a bad goal.

How much do man­ners mat­ter in improv­ing cus­tomer satisfaction?

Quite a bit, it turns out. Sat­is­fied cus­tomers tend to become loyal cus­tomers. Do you think your cus­tomers will return for repeat busi­ness if they’re treated rudely or not respected?

Your busi­ness, accord­ing to sta­tis­tics, will profit from 25 to 125% more by retain­ing a mere 5% of your cus­tomers.  But before you start to set goals for improv­ing cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, or imple­ment cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing, you first need to teach your staff the impor­tance of respect­ing the customer.

Your com­pany will have its unique ques­tions and tools that your cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives will need to be trained in, but com­mon man­ners are uni­ver­sal and can be applied at all lev­els of the com­pany, for all types of cus­tomer service.

The old stand­bys: “please” and “thank you,” and “how can I be help­ful” are sim­ple build­ing blocks that you first need to review with your cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives if you hope to increase cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion.

Once you begin to teach your staff to adopt an atti­tude of polite­ness, cour­tesy, and grat­i­tude toward your cus­tomers, you can begin teach­ing them the finer points nec­es­sary in cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing.

Our tip? If Miss Man­ners approves of how your cus­tomers are treated, you’re on the right track.

Peggy Car­law is the founder of Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems, a lead­ing train­ing com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in improv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions between front-line employ­ees and cus­tomers. Peggy is co-author of sev­eral books pub­lished by McGraw-Hill, includ­ing Man­ag­ing and Moti­vat­ing Con­tact Cen­ter Employ­ees and The Big Book of Sales Train­ing Games.

Peggy Carlaw

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