Whatever customer-focused training you attend, it will probably focus on the needs of the customers of your organisation.
Usually these are external customers: the people walking through the shop door in retail, online users of a service you’ve developed or someone else that wants something from your company. You might call them clients or users or patrons, but customer care tends to always be targeted at the people that are engaging with whatever your organisation is providing.
Every now and then a customer care course will touch on internal customers. This is often in the context of a specific team designed to offer a help service primarily internally, such as your local IT help desk supporting internal staff. This content is rarely delivered in the same context, however. A retail team receives a customer care course becaue the organisation wants to give customers a good experience and come back for more. With an internal help desk, the internal users are stuck with them. In the past teams were often sent on customer care course because the organisation “believes in staff development and a course seemed appropriate” or in reaction to something going wrong.
Have you ever heard of a situation where a user complained about a bad attitude in the help desk and the response was to send someone on a course to improve them? Was the person that went on that course happy to go and ready to engage with it?
This tends to lead to grumbling staff that stubbornly believe they are right to do things their way. The help desk gets a reputation as the place you call when you have to, because there’s no other choice.
Stop reacting
In recent years there has been a bit of a shift here. Rather than taking this reactionary approach to training internal help teams, some organisations are starting to proactively explore the skills that would make a team more successful, and not just because “it sounds good”. There is growing recognition that this creates benefits for everyone: staff feel engaged up front, they get some input into what courses they might go on, and courses can be framed in contexts relevant to their roles. The end result is a better experience for staff, and staff that can then pass that experience onto their colleagues.
What’s happening is that managers are starting to realise that relationship management and personalised experiences are more than just something that retains customers. Staff retention is obviously an end goal, but everything in the middle is about relationships and positive cultures that cascades between teams. If positive interactions can be fostered in teams that liaise and engage with other parts of your organisation, this positive culture can spread naturally.
HR is a help desk
A large organisation might have more teams than just an IT help desk that engage across departments and teams. You might have a dedicated payroll team, HR team, wellbeing team, maintenance team, telephony team and more. These teams are all providing services to internal staff.
When we recruit staff to these teams, they tend to be interviewed based on their skills and whether they are capable of doing the functional, operational parts of the job. If there’s any consideration to the personality, it’s almost always in the context of whether or not they are a good fit for the team, rather than whether they are a ‘people person’ that is a good fit for everyone.
Of course t’s not possible to screen every candidate for how they might interact with any other person they might encounter in the workplace, and nor should we. Diversity in personalities and backgrounds is a strength, though that’s a topic for another day.
We could consider support their development in skills for interacting with other, but most organisations wouldn’t consider offering these training in people skills or customer care, because they don’t talk to customers.
People skills are for everyone
Customer care is all about relationships between individuals. These courses teach people how to interact with other people such that they work together towards a postiive outcome, helping each other out.
When teaching these sorts of courses, trainers recognise that they are dealing with individuals, both in terms of customers and the trainees, and a good course will investigate how individuality can create challenges and opportunities to explore towards creating positive experiences. A course will often offer different tools that individuals can apply and develop in a way that works for them.
Unless you are a one-person company that never talks to anyone, your company is also a place that works best when filled with positive relationships between people.
Customer care skills are people skills that build better relationships. Aimed at customers, they can create a great, personalised customer experiences. Aimed at colleagues, they can create great, collaborative working environments, that in turn create more positive customer experiences.
Why do so many organisations focus on the interactions with customers while neglecting the interactions between staff, when those interactions set the baseline of the working culture? If we can support our staff with the skills to build relationships, and we can show them how that can benefit them, then we can build a more motivated workforce.
We’re all friends here
This could easily grow into a piece about the pros and cons of having friends in the workplace. It could dig even deeper into how people skills can buid trust and create more autonomous peer-supported staff. It could explore how this can all lead to staff inspiration and innovation rather than getting stuck in their ways doing the same job for decades. However, it’s already been something of a waffle to get here, so I’ll just finish with a quick question:
Why wouldn’t be want to invest in relationship and people skills for everyone?
