Web Extras – Skill Sharpener

Will your staff be ready and equipped to deal with 2017’s emerging trends?— 2017 will be full of changes. Here are additional suggestions from this month’s contributors on how to make sure that your staff is prepared.

• Barbara Burke on the skills managers should be looking for in new reps.
• Suggestions from John Goodman on why it’s important to keep agents engaged in their work in 2017.
• A blog post from Chip Bell on making learning easier for reps.

Managers can help to combat stress in the workplace — Job and workplace stress is a major obstacle to productivity. But you can help keep it under control with these resources.

• An exercise from Genella Macintyre’s book, Five Steps to Reducing Stress. Share it with your staff.
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• An article from the Customer Service Group archives. Share it with your staff.

Are your reps providing positively outrageous service? — For more ideas on providing positively outrageous service and building a personal brand, check out the following resources:

• An article describing T. Scott Gross’s personal experience in providing outrageous service.
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• An article from the Customer Service Group archives in which Gross advises reps on how to build their personal brands.

How successful are your reps at managing their time? — Here are some additional resources for time management:

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• An excerpt from Jackie Gaines’s book, Wait a Hot Minute!.
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• An article from the Customer Service Group archives on how reps can manage time by improving their listening skills.

Reinforce reps’ efforts to use positive language with customers — The following resources will help your reps keep things positive with customers.

• A blog post by JoAnna Brandi on “The Problem with ‘No Problem.’”
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• An article from the Customer Service Group archives with further advice from JoAnna Brandi on “thinking — and acting — positively.”

Help your reps deal effectively with workplace change — The following resources will help your staff through periods of change:

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• A Barbara Burke blog post on dealing with toxic talk.
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• An article featuring Barbara Burke’s advice on how to deal with workplace change. Share it with your staff.

Ongoing training and reinforcement keep listening skills sharp — Use the following resources to help reps hone their listening skills.

• A table of phrases that reps can use when paraphrasing.
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• An article from the Customer Service Group archives that provides an active listening self-test.

Making teamwork work in the service center — For additional ideas and insights on improving teamwork in the service center, read and share these articles:

• Mario Moussa discusses the STAR model for team building in this Wharton@Work article.
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• Renee Evenson talks to frontline reps about contributing to the success of the team. Share it with your staff.

A car-maker’s hard-won lessons apply to all service professionals — Joseph A. Michelli, author of Driven to Delight, reports on Mercedes-Benz USA’s efforts to improve its customer experience and what customer service reps in general can learn from that experience. Michelli offers additional advice in the links below:

• In this blog post Michelli suggests how managers can leave a “leadership legacy” in their organizations.
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• Michelli has also worked with and reported on the Starbucks service mission in his book Leading the Starbucks Way. Here’s a summary article from the Customer Service Group archives.

Help reps to make a more positive impression with customers — A group of well-known customer service experts bring their expertise to bear in this issue of The Customer Communicator to answer the question, “What can reps do to make a more positive impression on customers?” The links below offer additional help from some of those experts.

• Read Jeff Toister’s blog post on the “2015 National Rage Study” that looks at what customers don’t like about the customer experience.
• Share an article from the Customer Service Group archives. It will help your staff keep a positive attitude.