Celebrate customer service staff and increase your sales

Customer Service Week is organised by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) it “Celebrates the people, processes, and innovations that make customer experiences better.” Friday’s theme is Customer Service Recognition Day.

Why is it important, how can your business benefit from celebrating your staff and some ways to recognise them.

Why celebrate staff in customer service?

How do you celebrate who is doing what that is working well? It’s important for feeling recognised so that staff feel loyal to the company and are therefore doing the best for the company. It is also about bringing about change, too.

What makes a staff member good?

What is it about a member of staff that makes them good? Is it the feedback they get from customers? Is it the service targets that they reach? Value this member of staff further by giving them some more responsibility (and paying them accordingly!) Could they run a training session? Could they do a Q and A with the team?

Buddy up staff

Buddy up staff with different skills. This has so many benefits. No-one is good at everything but two people can help each other with what one person finds difficult. This can be fun, useful and most importantly will feel unthreatening. No one from management is breathing down their neck. It’s a safe place to try out things, learn new skills and not be afraid to ask questions and get useful feedback.

Reward staff for good results!

Reward staff with cake or some other treat that you know they will like. Give the reward for reaching a target, such as the team getting the most “Thank yous” for the way in which they handled a complaint. This is so much more meaningful and constructive than a target on numbers of complaints dealt with in a certain amount of time, for example.

Staff will be competing in a friendly way to see who can be the most effective and who has made the most positive difference to customers. Making the most positive difference to customers ultimately means improving loyalty and sales.You don’t have to measure whether a customer comes back, you measure how staff made customers feel.

Customers can tell you who is good a staff member

Ask customers to nominate a member of staff whom they would like the company to reward with a small gift. Not by having to fill out an online form details for which the staff member has to circle on a receipt. These are truly awful ways to get feedback about individual staff! This puts pressure on staff and places a feeling of guilt on the customer if they don’t do it, as well as being time onerous for the customer.

Think of some more creative ways of doing this. Perhaps randomly selecting customers, providing a small gift for their time in giving you feedback about their service and asking if there were any individuals whom the customer thinks should be mentioned for going over and above good service. Reward that member of staff, explaining why, which also encourages other staff.

Celebrate staff achievements

Celebrate these achievements and others. If a staff member turns a customer yelling and swearing down the phone into a customer who apologises and accepts the decision, whatever that may be, then celebrate it. These kinds of things turn around what could be hard and draining into a positive experience.

Just tell them…

Just occasionally tell your staff that they are doing a great job. When you can see someone has had a bad day, check that they are OK. Thank that member of staff. It’s the little things that matter to help foster a happy environment in which to work.

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