Mapping Your Company Culture to Customer Service: A Powerful Combination By Joe Henderson, Senior Vice President Human Resources, CGS Recently, new academic research was published (with much fanfare in the professional learning and development press) that identified the top three skills that customer service representatives must possess to build customer loyalty, increase sales and lower customer acquisition costs. The study revealed that companies with the most effective loyalty-inducing customer service train their representatives to 1) effectively resolve problems, 2) cross sell and 3) assure quality. Now to tell you the truth, this insight is not terribly enlightening to me. It seems, well, pretty basic. According to this, if you train your employees on the top customer service skills, you are on your way to success, right? Well… only partially. It’s one thing to have the skills and another to work in a corporate culture that encourages employees to use these skills. For example, problem resolution is an important skill. Often, service representatives are the first employees to have contact with dissatisfied customers or to become aware of a situation that may lead to a problem. While training can teach people how to effectively correct a problem (i.e. the skill of logical decision-making), the service rep has to actually be empowered by the company to take action. In a real world example, the customer service culture at the Ritz-Carlton radically empowers employees to solve problems immediately, even if it requires spending money. It discourages passing problems up the hierarchy. Not only are employees trained on the skills of good customer service, but they are expected to execute it personally and are praised by management when they do. One famous story involves a maid who personally flew to Hawaii to return a laptop left by a customer in time for their critical business meeting. Not only did the culture applaud her efforts, but now Ritz-Carlton has a customer for life. At Conferon, ExpoExchange and ITS, an important element of the corporate cultures is embodied in the statement “In Control of Achieving the Goal.” The culture demands that all employees have a personal responsibility in assuring quality and an excellent customer experience. The cultures promote behavior in which anyone, including the presidents of the companies, will roll up their sleeves and fix a problem if needed. If cross-selling is important, training on selling skills and product knowledge is not enough in and of itself. Your culture must reward all employees for cross-selling, not just direct sales people, and be open with communication on the financial progress of the firm to make the urgency of cross-selling evident. Experience shows that great training, if implemented in a vacuum, does not yield a return on investment. Your company’s culture provides the nutrients for those skills to grow!